Kalyva Image and Text in Conceptual Art

Image and Text in Conceptual Ar t
Critical Operations in Context
Eve Kalyva
Image and Text in Conceptual Art
e.m.kalyva@gmail.com
Eve Kalyva
Image and Text

in Conceptual Art
Critical Operations in Context
Eve Kalyva
Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-45085-8 ISBN 978-3-319-45086-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5
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Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the help and assistance of
others. I would like to specially thank my family for their enduring support
and encouragement, Gail Day, Eric Prenowitz, Alex Potts, Fred Orton,
Ana Longoni and Fernando Davis for their guidance and advice, and
Mike Leggett, Charles Harrison, Jorge Glusberg, Lynda Morris, Christa-
Maria Lerm-Hayes, John Roberts, Mariana Marchesi, Silvia Dolinko,
Nicholas Logsdail, Andrew Wilson, Victoria Worsley, Mike Sperlinger,
Peter Osborne, Michael Newman, Terry Smith, Marco Pasqualini de
Andrade, W.J.T. Mitchell, Stefan Römer, Dominic Rahtz, Francis Halsall,
Véronique Plesch, Marisa Baldasarre, Laura Malosetti Costa and Ignaz
Cassar for their invaluable insights. I would also like to thank the follow-
ing for their generosity and assistance: Art & Language, Victor Burgin,
John Hilliard, Carlos Ginzburg, Juan Carlos Romero, Luis Pazos, Graciela
Carnevale, the Ian Breakwell Estate, the Tate Archives, the Whitechapel
Gallery Archive, the Fairleigh Dickinson University Library Archives, Arts
Council England, the British Council, the International Center for the
Arts of the Americas–Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of
Modern Art New York Archives, the Smithsonian Institution Archives,
the Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires, Eduardo Sívori Museum
Archives, Lisson Gallery, London, Richard Saltoun, London, Document
Art Gallery, Buenos Aires, the Henrique Faria Gallery, New York, and the
Museo Castagnino+macro, Rosario.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Why Language? 2
1.2 About This Book 8
References 14
2 Parallels Between Art and Language 15

2.1 Opening Remarks15
2.2 From Expression Theory to the Institutional
Theory of Art16
2.2.1 Logical Problems with Expression Theory17
2.2.2 Towards an Institutional Theory of Art19
2.3 Art as a Social Phenomenon. Semiotics and Ideology23
2.3.1 A Semiotics of Visual Culture25
2.3.2 A Social History of Art29
2.4 Art Systems and the Art Historical Discourse30
2.5 New Perspectives from Socio-Linguistics:
Discourse Analysis and Multimodality33
2.6 Closing Remarks36
References 38
3 The Performative Gesture of Image

and Text Juxtapositions 43
3.2 Speech Act Theory46
vii
viii Contents
3.3 Staging the Act: Keith Arnatt’s Art as an Act

of Retraction (1971)51
3.3.1 Photography and Intentionality53
3.3.2 Locating Arnatt’s Performative Gesture57
3.3.3 Retractions and Rules of Engagement62
3.4 The Case of Documentation: Roelof Louw’s
Tape-Recorder Project (6) (1971)68
3.4.1 Transforming Voices and Commands on Tape71
3.4.2 The Document and the Archive75
3.5 Art and Violence in the Open Air:
The Activities of CAYC80
3.5.1 Conceptual Art and Conceptualism83
3.5.2 Inversion, Art and Violence86
3.5.3 Closure, Enclosure and Exposure100
References104
4 The Logico‐Semantics of Image and Text111

4.2 Wittgenstein and Halliday115
4.3 The Horror of the Gallery‐Goer: Keith Arnatt’s
Trouser‐Word Piece (1972)121
4.3.1 Metaphors and Power Structures125
4.3.2 Dissemination and Afterlife132
4.4 The Situation of Propositions: Victor Burgin’s
Room (1970)135
4.4.1 Defining a Place for Art137
4.4.2 Context and Experience139
4.4.3 Competing Voices and Their Limits145
4.5 The Politics of Intertextuality: Juan Carlos
Romero’s Swift en Swift (1970)154
4.5.1 Printmaking and the Context of Violence155
4.5.2 Naming Names? Superimposition
as a Violent Act160
4.5.3 Artistic Practice and Political Mobilisation166
References173
Contents ix
5 Rhetorical Operations and the Discursive

Creation of Meaning177
5.2 The Dialectics of Analysis180
5.3 Rhetoric and the Activity of Writing: Art &
Language’s Lecher System (1970)184
5.3.1 Changes in Education and the Artworld186
5.3.2 The Dissonance of Greenbergian Formalism190
5.3.3 Movement in Four Acts193
5.3.4 A Long-Lasting Irony?198
5.4 Market Trends: Language, Pages and “Wordworks”
on Show200
5.4.1 The Page and the Art Press201
5.4.2 Staging Exhibitions, Catalogues and Book Shows209
References221
6 Conclusions225
6.1 The State of Affairs Today230
References232
Bibliography235
Index 253
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Victor Burgin, Possession (1976). Duotone Lithograph.

118.9 × 84.1 cm (© Victor Burgin. Courtesy the British
Council Collection) 7
Fig. 2.1 The relation between language and myth according to
Roland Barthes (Reproduced from Barthes 1972) 26
Fig. 3.1 John Hilliard, 765 Paper Balls (1) (1969). Black and white
photograph on board. 122 × 122 cm (© John Hilliard) 55
Fig. 3.2 Ian Breakwell, UNWORD 2 (1969). Performance still.
17 October 1969, ICA, London (© Ian Breakwell and
Mike Leggett. The Estate of Ian Breakwell) 64
Fig. 3.5 Ian Breakwell, UNWORD 2 (1969). Performance stills.
Fig. 3.6 Carlos Ginzburg, Tierra (1971) at the exhibition Arte
de Sistemas I, 19 July–22 August 1971. Fibre inkjet black
and white print mounted on acid free museum board.
8 photographs, 10 3/8 × 14 1/4 inches (26.3 × 36.2 cm)
each. (Detail) CAYC/Museum of Modern Art, Buenos
Aires (© Carlos Ginzburg. Courtesy of the artist and
Henrique Faria, New York) 88
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 3.7 Carlos Ginzburg, Tierra (1971) at the exhibition Arte de

Sistemas I, 19 July–22 August 1971. Fibre inkjet black
and white print mounted on acid free museum board.
8 photographs, 10 3/8 × 14 1/4 inches (26.3 × 36.2 cm)
each. (Detail) CAYC/Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires
(© Carlos Ginzburg. Courtesy of the artist and Henrique
Faria, New York) 89
Fig. 3.8 Grupo Experiencias Estéticas (Luis Pazos, Héctor Puppo
and Jorge de Luján Gutiérrez), La cultura de la felicidad
(1971) at the exhibition Arte de Sistemas I, 19 July–22
August 1971. Photographic print. CAYC/Museum of
Modern Art, Buenos Aires 91
Fig. 3.9 Grupo Experiencias Estéticas (Luis Pazos, Héctor Puppo
and Jorge de Luján Gutiérrez), La cultura de la felicidad
(1971) at the exhibition Arte de Sistemas I, 19 July–22
August 1971. Photographic print. CAYC/Museum of
Modern Art, Buenos Aires 92
Fig. 3.10 Joseph Beuys, Comparación entre dos tipos de sociedades:
La forma de destruir la dictadura de los partidos (1972).
(Side A) Bag circulated at the exhibition Arte e Ideología/
CAYC al aire libre, September 1972. Roberto Arlt Square,
Buenos Aires. Part of Arte de Sistemas II, 21 September–8
October 1972. CAYC/Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires 95
Fig. 3.11 Joseph Beuys, Comparación entre dos tipos de sociedades:
La forma de destruir la dictadura de los partidos (1972).
(Side B) Bag circulated at the exhibition Arte e Ideología/
Fig. 3.12 Installation view of Luis Pazos, Proyecto de monumento al
prisionero político desaparecido (1972) at the exhibition
Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre, September 1972.
Roberto Arlt Square, Buenos Aires. Part of Arte de
Sistemas II, 21 September–8 October 1972. CAYC/
Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires 97
Fig. 3.13 Installation view of Roberto Duarte Laferriere, Eduardo
Leonetti, Luis Pazos and Ricardo Roux, La realidad
subterránea (1972) at the exhibition Arte e Ideología/
Leonetti, Luis Pazos and Ricardo Roux, La realidad
List of Figures xiii
subterránea (1972) at the exhibition Arte e Ideología/

Leonetti, Luis Pazos, Juan Carlos Romero and Ricardo Roux,
El juego lúgubre (1972) at the exhibition Arte e Ideología/
Fig. 4.1 Victor Burgin, Room (1970) (© Victor Burgin) 142
Fig. 4.2 Juan Carlos Romero, 4.000.000 m2 de la ciudad de
Buenos Aires (1970). Text and ten photographs,
60 × 50 cm each. (Detail) (© Juan Carlos Romero.
The archive of Juan Carlos Romero) 148
Fig. 4.3 Lawrence Weiner, Declaration of Intent (1968)
(© Lawrence Weiner) 152
Fig. 4.4 Douglas Huebler, Duration Piece # 8 (1970)
(© Douglas Huebler) 152
Fig. 4.5 Juan Carlos Romero, En homenaje a los caídos el 25/5/73
en la lucha por la liberación 1973/Homenaje a Bellocq
1943–1973 (1973). Photographic collage. 79.5 × 69.5 cm.
Collection Museo Castagnino+macro, Rosario, Argentina 159
Fig. 4.6 Installation view of Juan Carlos Romero, Swift en Swift
(1970) at the exhibition 3er Premio Swift de Grabado,
9–27 September 1970. Museum of Modern Art, Buenos
Aires. Collection Mauro Herlitzka 160
Fig. 4.7 Mural detail near the entrance to the Swift meat
processing plant, Berisso, La Plata, 1971. The archive
of Juan Carlos Romero 167
Fig. 4.8 Installation view of Perla Benveniste, Eduardo Leonetti,
Luis Pazos, Juan Carlos Romero and Edgardo Antonio Vigo,
Proceso a nuestra realidad (1973) at the exhibition 4o Salón
Premio Artistas con Acrilicopaolini, 3–19 August 1973.
Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires 170
Fig. 5.1 Installation view of Art & Language, Index 01 (1972)
at Documenta 5, 30 June–8 October 1972, Kassel.
Private collection, Switzerland 189
Fig. 5.2 Installation view of Art & Language, Lecher System (1970)
and Lecher Lines (1970) at the exhibition Idea Structures,
24 June–19 July 1970. Camden Arts Centre, London 194
Fig. 5.3 Installation view of the touring exhibition Artists’ Bookworks
(1975) (© The British Council) 217
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Conceptual art, as a historical art movement that emerged in the late

1960s and early 1970s and as a point of reference for contemporary art
practices, is generally identified by its use of language. For many, it has
even redefined writing as an artistic practice. But how exactly was language
used, and with what aim? Equally important, how has the presence of lan-
guage in a visual art context affected and changed the ways in which art is
talked about, theorised and produced?
Conceptual artists utilised language in various ways: identifications, state-
ments, instructions, commands, observations, descriptions, propositions,
citations, discussions and so on. These were often combined with pho-
tographs, objects, actions or locations, and were presented as captions,
postcards, sketches or essays. Among other things, words appeared on the
gallery wall, in the streets, in exhibition catalogues and artists’ books, and
were handed out to spectators or circulated in art magazines and bulletins.
This book examines this juxtaposition of images and texts in conceptual
art and specifically the cases where the visual is deliberately compared and
contrasted with the textual—cases, in other words, where artists critically
engage the relation between what one sees and what one reads. The terms
“text” and “image” will therefore be used in their generalised catego-
ries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book will show how the
juxtaposition of images and texts was one of the strategies that concep-
tual art employed in order to expose and challenge several ideological and
institutional demands placed on artistic practice. These demands included
© The Author(s) 2016 1

E. Kalyva, Image and Text in Conceptual Art,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5_1
2 E. KALYVA
the production of visual and tangible objects, of objects that were unique
and non-perishable, and of objects that could be easily designated as “art”
and be largely qualified as vehicles of expression by their universal aesthetic
value. Such demands marked the historical context of conceptual art dom-
inated by American modernism, and remain relevant to contemporary art
as a lucrative and globalised business.
Conceptual art is one of those art movements that has self-reflectively
scrutinised the status of art. It advanced an institutional critique that inter-
rogated the practices and traditions of the artworld, the gallery system and
the modernist art discourse. It also advanced a socio-political critique that
sought to redefine the function of art within the wider social sphere. Artists
clustered under the term “conceptual” explored how meaning is materially
and discursively created in the art context, and how artworks can manipu-
late the chain of signification and subvert meaning beyond that art context.
The juxtaposition of images and texts, therefore, becomes one way of criti-
cally juxtaposing the site of visual art to other sites of cultural and social
activity. It implicates the relation of art to theory and brings art’s critical
and social dimensions to the fore.
Another keyword associated with conceptual art is “dematerialisation”.
The call for a dematerialised object of art extended John Cage’s “dema-
terialisation of intention” and advocated against the production of stable
art-objects exclusively destined for gallery display. In their seminal article
The dematerialization of art, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler (1968)
detect a tendency in the artistic production of their time to move away
from producing finite objects and from object-making in general. They
moreover identify within this tendency the potential to challenge the spec-
tatorial expectations of the gallery visitors and engage them instead as
participants; and to challenge the traditional responses to art, the materi-
als typically associated with it and the critic’s role in evaluating the work’s
formal or emotive impact.
1.1 Why Language?

But the question remains: Why use language? Language gives particular
sociability to art’s critical gesture since it is the means of interpersonal
communication. The use of language also capacitates an engagement with
the context of artistic production. This includes how an artwork is pro-
duced, received and understood, as well as the place that it occupies cul-
turally, as part of a tradition of production and in society more generally.
INTRODUCTION 3
In short, it foregrounds how and what art communicates. In previous

artistic movements such as the Russian avant-garde, the dialogue between
the visual and the textual derived from the reconceptualisation of art as
an active agent in social change (Grey 1986). For Futurism, Dada and
Cubism, an experimental approach to visual and poetic representation was
supported by typographical innovation (Drucker 1994). In the case of
conceptual art, the historical context of the 1960s and 1970s was marked
by American modernism, the growth of the art market and cultural impe-
rialism, socio-political shifts at a global scale and media propaganda, as
well as reconsiderations of the role of d iscourse, language and culture in
capitalist societies more broadly.
American modernism and in particular the formalism of Clement
Greenberg became the most theorised and predominant model for artis-
tic production. It was materially supported and discursively promoted by
wealthy metropolitan museums with large-scale exhibitions such as New
York Painting and Sculpture 1940–1970 (16 October 1969–1 February
1970, the Metropolitan Museum of Art), which presented more than 400
works. It also enjoyed corporate funding such as that from the Guggenheim,
the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations, which was explicitly aligned to
their political programmes. It is to this conjuncture of artistic production,
marketing and discourse that critically engaged conceptual art brought
attention. In turn, that this conjuncture remains under scrutiny is one of
conceptual art’s contributions to contemporary art and criticism.
In a plethora of texts, modernist art discourse defined the experience
of art as universal and unmediated, a private affair of contemplation away
from any social or political concerns. The production of modernist nar-
ratives exponentially increased during the Cold War. At the same time
that anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggles throughout the world
negated the self-declared dominance of capitalism and workers’, students’
and social rights’ movements rejected its institutions, American modern-
ism functioned as a placeholder for bourgeois values and capitalist ideol-
ogy. It became instrumental in the United States’ programme of cultural
colonisation—in particular abstract expressionism, which was celebrated
as a truly American art form and a triumph over politically committed art
(Cockcroft 1974). In Latin America, American modernism occupied the
artworld through what was advanced as the “internationalisation of style”
yet took place in a social context characterised by imperialist exploitation,
US interventionism, consecutive military dictatorships, media propaganda
and fierce social repression.
4 E. KALYVA
In this historical context, many conceptual art practices incorporated

or emerged as a critique of American modernism and its associated ideas
regarding the autonomous and disinterested artwork, the uniqueness of
the artistic genius and the private interests of art. They challenged the
hierarchical and ideological divisions between the artist as the producer,
the critic as the qualifying expert and the viewer as the consumer. They
opposed the isolation of art from other social activities and political con-
cerns, and criticised capitalist society and consumerist culture. This was
done by using language but also by utilising the media and the press, stag-
ing public interventions, carrying out sociological research and develop-
ing activities outside the official gallery networks. Indeed, conceptual art
can be seen as modernism’s nervous breakdown (Baldwin and Ramsden
1997, 32).
Notwithstanding the focus of this book on the critical interests of
conceptual art, it should not be assumed that every conceptual artist was
interested in advancing an institutional or a socio-political critique. Using
language was often simply a matter of following the trend, or a marketing
strategy that both artists and galleries employed because of the low costs
involved in the reproduction and dissemination of text-based works. It is
important therefore to emphasise the difference between a critical use of
language and a symptomatic proliferation of printed matter that stated
nothing further than the obvious. A further reason for the increase of
textual production has to do with documentation. Photographs, project
descriptions, letters, sketches, notes and instructions were used as a con-
firmation of an absent work or idea after the event. These attracted the
interest of collectors and institutions who became instrumental in confer-
ring to such paraphernalia of the creative process the status of art and a
price tag to match.
Another historical factor that conditioned the use of language in con-
ceptual art was the state of affairs of scholarship. While the modernist
art discourse dominated the artworld, analytic philosophy from the mid
1950s onwards refuted the accountability of language for universal truth
and demanded deeper attention to its use. This method of analysis revealed
logical problems in the expression theory of art that held it to be a univer-
sal vehicle of emotions, and became the basis for a systemic and culturally
specific understanding of the artworld (Danto, Dickie). In addition, the
incorporation of Marxist dialectics in the analysis of society and culture
exposed the workings of ideology, helped conceptualise the p rocesses of
mystification and alienation, and demonstrated how narratives structure
INTRODUCTION 5
social life (Barthes, Althusser, Foucault). It particularly showed how, in

consumerist cultures where the media and the official cultural outlets
propagate whatever aspect of reality better suits the financial and political
interests of their stake-holders, the public space of language becomes sub-
verted. By the end of the 1970s, the newly established discourse analysis
and visual culture studies underlined the social and political dimensions of
both language and art as sites of ideological conflict; and a social history
of art developed with influences from Marxism (Hauser, Clark), and later
feminist critique and critical theory. These theoretical developments con-
tested the ideological investments made in the object of art as well as the
function of discourse in normalising the experience of art.
As such, the historical context of conceptual art was, in general, charac-
terised by reconsiderations and reevaluations of processes across the c ultural
and social spheres. In turn, conceptual art instituted a critical enquiry
into the production and function of art. This causes certain difficulties in
discussing conceptual art. Some of its propositions, for example that other
artistic means beyond painting and sculpture are eligible, may now appear
self-evident. Returning to conceptual art is important, however, since it
initiated crucial debates, still unresolved today, regarding the role of insti-
tutions and the market, the relation between theory and practice, the rela-
tion between art and politics, and the hegemonic practices of art history.
Let us return to the starting point of this book—conceptual art’s critical
engagement with art and society through the juxtaposition of images and
texts. Too often, conceptual artworks are considered to have failed to
suppress the aesthetic experience of art or to be authoritarian versions
of the ready-made (Krauss, Buchloh, de Duve). This may be relevant to
works that did not aim to address or that did not succeed in interrogating
the support systems which made them possible. As a result, they may have
dematerialised their object (in the sense of lacking formal restrictions of
execution) but their propositions as works of art could still be absorbed by
the Greenbergian paradigm of a formalised, introvert and ahistorical art.
At the same time, many contemporary art practices seek to specify and call
upon a “strong” conceptual art tradition of prioritising the “idea”. This
enables them to use their own relation to discourse as a form of legitima-
tion and to justify their celebrated self-referential status (Osborne 1997).
By these accounts, the position of conceptual art seems paradoxical,
having been put to use in serving different, and often competing, interests.
Yet understanding how artistic production is wrapped in a discursive
field is another one of conceptual art’s most important contributions.
6 E. KALYVA
As for the general conception that conceptual art prioritised the idea behind
the work, this is only one side of the story. To be exact, conceptual art dem-
onstrated the dependence of art, its experience and meaning on context.
It specifically showed that the licence to claim that one is only interested
in a something (an idea, a significant form, a universal aesthetics) and that
nothing else matters can only be supported within particular discursive and
ideological frameworks. In the case of conceptual art, the most predomi-
nant of such frameworks are modernism and its ideological investments in
the aesthetic; the commodification of art and curatorial anxieties in clas-
sifying art-objects; and (cultural) imperialism. It is these frameworks that
critically engaged conceptual art practices sought to expose and challenge.
In order to do so, works from this period dislocated and recontextu-
alised not only different types of objects but also modes of production
and systems of interpretation. They drew attention to the habitual ways
of producing, looking at and theorising art, and contested the hierarchies
of value and meaning that operate across the space of art as a social space.
In search of resources and alternative frames of reference, artists turned
to subjects that were considered to be beyond the scope and established
interests of artistic practice such as philosophy of language, logic, math-
ematical and semiotic systems, official discourse, legal speak, the everyday,
mass media and advertisement. They juxtaposed seemingly incompatible
discourses in order to generate instances of critique and reflection on the
frameworks of interpretation and evaluation, and advanced a method of
critical looking that could be transposed from the context of art to other
spheres of activity and vice versa.
To be able to sustain this critique, the conceptual artwork remains pro-
visional, logically inconclusive or in oscillation between the obvious and
the absurd. This creates a discontinuity of meaning that confronts the
viewer and can only be resolved by recognising both the work’s claims and
the frameworks that determine how it is produced and received. Consider,
for example, Victor Burgin’s work Possession (1976). Produced to accom-
pany an exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, it was reprinted
in 500 copies and fly-posted across Newcastle (Fig. 1.1). This work draws
external resources in order to communicate its critique and exemplifies
what I will call the loan rhetoric of conceptual art (I return to this in
Chapter 5). Utilising distinct systems of reference, discourses and vocabu-
laries, this loan rhetoric becomes a means to critically situate artistic prac-
tice within the material and discursive contexts that make it possible and
a means to interrogate the practices which operate within these c ontexts.
INTRODUCTION 7
Fig. 1.1 Victor Burgin, Possession (1976). Duotone Lithograph. 118.9 × 84.1 cm
(© Victor Burgin. Courtesy the British Council Collection)
8 E. KALYVA
Image and text juxtapositions, therefore, do not only provide a route

to consider the role of language. More crucially, they become a way to
engage the social function of art.
1.2 About This Book

This book offers an interdisciplinary study of image and text juxtaposi-
tions as they were used critically in conceptual art. It examines the produc-
tion and reception of works in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and draws
its main examples from the historically established triangle of exchanges
across the United Kingdom, the US and Argentina. It specifies how art-
works communicate in context and evaluates their critical potential to
challenge the frameworks that determine how art is produced, theorised
and experienced. It proposes three methods of analysis that consider the
work’s performative gesture, its logico-semantic relations and the rhetori-
cal operations in the discursive creation of meaning. Resources are drawn
from art history and theory, philosophy, discourse analysis, literary criti-
cism and social semiotics.
These theoretical frameworks offer a methodologically well-structured
mode of analysis of the object in question both at the time of the event
and from our current historical standpoint. They are epistemologically
efficient in acknowledging the different contexts of the creative act (the
material, discursive, institutional and historical context), and in specifying
how the act functions within and impacts these contexts. They specifically
attend to a work’s material presence, interaction between different ele-
ments and contextual relevance. Analytic philosophy and speech act the-
ory were historically available and of interest to many conceptual artists,
and the concept of the performative has been widely applied in art history,
art criticism and image and text studies. For reasons of methodological
clarity, this approach is not used on artworks that themselves cite speech
act theory. Logico-semantics examines the process of meaning-making
in context, the frameworks of interpretation and, like speech act theory,
the conditions of communication. It was developed in the late 1970s
and offers a systematic approach to re-semiotisation and multimodality.
Rhetoric and how discourse can be manipulated formed another point of
historical interest for theorists and conceptual artists, and is a method of
analysis particularly suitable for works that contain longer textual compo-
nents. At the same time, it offers a reflective mode of engaging with the
telling and re-telling of the story of conceptual art—a process of constant
reconfiguration of status and value in which this book also partakes.
INTRODUCTION 9
One of the central premises of this book, which it takes from discourse
analysis and introduces to the examination of visual culture, is that mean-
ing is socially created. Specifically, meaning-making is a shared activity
within interpretive communities and for both texts and images, mean-
ing is not a priori but determined by function and use. The same goes
for their value. There is no one-to-one correspondence between truth
and language or nature and art. Signs have no fixed value, but they do
not freely float about, either. Rather, meaning is formulated by discursive
operations that set the standards of interpretation and evaluation.
By juxtaposing texts with images, conceptual art caused shifts in the
regimes of reading and viewing. Works negotiated their own particular
configuration against the assumptions and value systems that they sought
to challenge in terms of representation (a task traditionally reserved for
art), interpretation (a task traditionally reserved for criticism) and the
institutional frameworks that supported them. Transposing competing
voices and attitudes to the art gallery or a public site can expose the limits
and limitations of the discourses that operate in and define these sites. It
can also create a space wherein both the subject and the object can be dia-
lectically negotiated—a particular site of engagement, which disables the
presumed autonomous status of the referent and invites critical reflection.
At the same time, one must keep in mind how bestowing objects with
meaning and value as art is a historical practice. To understand something
(an image, a text, an artistic gesture) is to place it within an interpre-
tive context and set it in dialogue with common practices and prevail-
ing ideologies from that context. Making sense is a process that operates
within supporting frameworks and requires one to evaluate the relevant,
and therefore meaningful, associations that structure communication in its
historical development. To put it differently, things are always already read
and viewed in context wherein traditional and habitual regimes guide how
these are recognised and understood. For this reason, in order to engage
the frame of reference one must also engage the adequate and relevant
systems of signification and the rules of use.
With this in mind, this book will demonstrate how conceptual art opens
up and critically engages the space of art as a social space—a space of social
interaction, communication and responsibility. The context in which
the case studies will be discussed refers to socio-political developments,
key exhibitions and their reception, and theoretical discussions by artists
and critics on the nature of art, its classification, evaluation and role in
society, the use of language and the function of institutions. In considering
10 E. KALYVA
the effects of display and the politics of the gallery space, this book will
also scrutinise the archival material it uses. Special attention will be given
to how the press fulfils particular ideological and social functions in its
mediation of reality.
In order to situate the critical interest of conceptual art as a movement,
examples are taken from different geographical and socio-political sites.
This demonstrates how different practices advance their institutional and
socio-political critique, and how they relate to their context and to each
other. It also demonstrates the reapplicability of the methods of analysis.
As noted above, the concern of this book is cases where the textual is
brought into critical dialogue with the visual, and the terms “image” and
“text” will be used to refer to photographs, installations, accompanying
texts, explanatory notes, statements, propositions and essays on display
or in published form. By the same token, “juxtaposition” refers to the
visual presence of language in the art gallery context as well as to the use
of languages, discourses and rhetorics not traditionally associated with art.
Chapter 2 offers an overview of some of the main conceptual and meth-
odological parallels made between art and language such as expression
theory, analytic philosophy, the institutional theory of art, semiotics, dis-
course analysis and multimodality. It outlines key concepts regarding the
category of art, theorisations of the system of art and modes of engaging
with the object of art. It aims to bring the wider field of image and text
studies into dialogue with art history and theory, highlights the relation-
ship between image and text in its historical development within cultural
production, and demonstrates how they participate in communication as
a social process. By presenting the wider context of scholarship on the
relation between art and language, this chapter establishes the interdisci-
plinary interest of the analysis to follow. This overview also helps trace the
origin of many of the debates that resurface in the discussion of conceptual
art and of image and text relations. In other words, Chapter 2 helps frame
the frameworks of analysis.
Chapter 3 discusses speech act theory and the concept of the “perfor-
mative” in relation to Keith Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction (1971,
London), Roelof Louw’s Tape-Recorder Project (6) (1971, London and
New York) and the exhibitions Arte de Sistemas I [Art of Systems I] (1971,
Buenos Aires) and Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre [Art and Ideology/
CAYC in the open air] (1972, Buenos Aires) organised by the Centre
of Art and Communication (CAYC). It specifies how images and texts
operate in different physical environments as well as in different discursive
INTRODUCTION 11
contexts. It considers the use of photography and installation in staging

an event and in inverting the mediation of reality, the effects of docu-
mentation, the role of the archive and institutional discourse, and the
relation between art, violence and political mobilisation. Examining the
performative gesture of art demonstrates how the creation of meaning is a
social and shared activity, and allows us to determine how artworks func-
tion and communicate in context. Chapter 3 also reflects on the binary
distinction between conceptual art and conceptualism. It considers the
historical and discursive formulation of these terms and their nuances as
proper names with reference to the centre/periphery debate and to hege-
monic practices within art history.
Another way of examining how an artwork creates and manipulates the
conditions of its communication is to analyse its logico-semantic relations.
These are discussed in Chapter 4. A logico-semantic analysis determines
the relations between signs within linguistic structures and the relations
between signs and extra-linguistic objects and discourses—that is, the
semantic relations—in the meaning-making process. Rather than directly
applying the logico-semantic relations that M.A.K. Halliday established
between linguistic clauses in his development of functional grammar, this
chapter takes a wider approach. Based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s atten-
tion to the relation between propositions and the world and Halliday’s
consideration of language as a social semiotic system, this chapter devel-
ops a methodological framework for examining the logico-semantic rela-
tions between a work’s textual and visual components, as well as between
propositional content and visual presentation.
As case studies, Chapter 4 examines Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece (1972,
London), Victor Burgin’s Room (1970, London and Buenos Aires) and
Juan Carlos Romero’s Swift en Swift (1970, Buenos Aires). Even though
these artists and their works operated in different geographical and mate-
rial sites, they were historically in dialogue and came in contact through a
common network of critics and galleries. These works disturb the habitual
ways of reading and viewing art and interrogate its interpretive frame-
works. They draw attention to institutional legitimation, the social context
of communication, aesthetic apprehension and social violence. This chap-
ter also discusses the effects of the work’s transposition to different geo-
graphical sites and from the gallery wall to the catalogue page, as well as
the difference between a tautological and a critically engaged practice.
This difference, together with how the use of language was a prominent
topic of discussion, is illustrated in the examination of Joseph Kosuth’s Art
12 E. KALYVA
after philosophy and Burgin’s Situational aesthetics, both published in the

same issue of Studio International in 1969. Chapter 4 continues the dis-
cussion on the relation between art and politics, the workings of ideology
and media propaganda. It also makes an important distinction between
the particular aesthetic investments in art that conceptual art sought to
challenge and how the work’s own material presence and textual stylistics
contribute to its meaning. This line of enquiry is further developed in
Chapter 5.
Chapter 5 scrutinises the discursive creation of meaning and argues
that conceptual art did not only engage art’s aesthetic but also its rhetoric.
This refers to the rhetoric used when talking about art as well as to the
rhetorical operations performed by the work itself. This chapter examines
discourse in terms of the institution of art, the writing of history and
the normalisation of knowledge; and determines the rhetorical shifts that
a work performs in order to destabilise different frames of reference. It
closely reads Greenbergian formalism vis-à-vis Art & Language’s Lecher
System (1970) which, in varying forms, appeared on gallery display and
in exhibition catalogues, art magazines and book publications. Typical to
Art & Language’s practice, the boundaries of the object in question are
not clear. Drawing on this and borrowing from Paul de Man’s discussion
of rhetoric and irony, Chapter 5 locates the loan rhetoric of conceptual
art. This will be specified as a strategy of manipulating different voices
and languages in order to challenge the designated context for art. This
causes shifts in meaning that in turn expose the conventional framings of
art—an intention that is further incorporated into the mode of the work’s
production—and reframe the relation between theory and practice.
The examination of a work’s loan rhetoric enables our understanding of
the dialectical relationship between the work and the world. It focuses on
how a work negotiates a polyphony of voices in order to comprise its own,
and offers a way to approach a practice that self-reflectively engages the frame-
works that define it and which it seeks to contest. Crucially however, this pro-
cess does not end at the work but becomes part of the telling and re-telling
of its story. If conceptual art has changed the ways we do and talk about art,
this attention to discourse is its legacy in terms of contribution to theory.
The second part of Chapter 5 reviews different uses of the page, the function
of the art press and shifting exhibition trends. The latter range from exhibi-
tions that critically engaged their location and catalogue, such as those organ-
ised by Lucy Lippard and Seth Siegelaub, to commercial shows and survey
exhibitions. In doing so, this chapter charts how a market for word-related
INTRODUCTION 13
objects emerged by the end of the 1970s. This effectively institutionalised

conceptual art and rematerialised its object.
Chapter 6, Conclusions, summarises the contribution of conceptual
art to artistic practice and art theory, and reiterates art’s critical poten-
tial. Conceptual art demonstrated a mode of interrogating the systems of
apprehension, classification and evaluation by working around the frame
of reference, and opened up the space of art as a social space. Image and
text juxtaposition is one such strategy for implicating and challenging mul-
tiple voices, activities and discourses from both the artworld and the wider
social context. While this book proposes three frameworks for analysing
the use of juxtaposition in conceptual art, it hopes to offer a compre-
hensive methodology that can be applied in other examples from art and
visual culture. Following conceptual art’s institutional and socio-political
critique, one such instance is what has been identified, in contemporary
art, as social practice. Conceptual art also problematised the object of art
in relation to theory and drew to the surface the implications of writ-
ing about art and “doing” art history. This book becomes an additional
discursive framework that situates the conceptual artwork. One cannot
ignore how it participates in processes that locate the work and what is
considered to be the work by choosing adequate frames of reference; nor
how an ever-expanding market and proliferating (albeit often competing)
art historiographical narratives constantly reframe and rewrite the story of
conceptual art.
If there is discontinuity between the voice of the present interdisciplin-
ary analysis and the accustomed frameworks for treating conceptual art,
this can help play out the dissonance that conceptual art practices created
by bringing together a polyphony of voices and methods. Perhaps inter-
disciplinarity, like juxtaposition, is not possible unless one is willing to
critically suspend the institutional separations that make it possible.
This book will not do a number of things. It will not attempt to define
“conceptual art” as a singular art movement, nor will it profess to offer
an exhaustive study of how images and texts have been used by concep-
tual or other artists. But it will locate the contextual relevance and critical
potential of selected case studies and consider the space that they occupy
historically and discursively. Equally, it will not try to defend the presence
or absence of any aesthetic impulse. Rather, it will discuss how historical
value systems determine what is to be understood as the nature and scope
of art and the vested interests that isolate artistic production from other
social, political and economic processes.
14 E. KALYVA
In recent years, there has been a tendency to celebrate the fluidity of

meaning. At the same time, however, artworks rely upon discursive opera-
tions beyond their body in order to convey and legitimise their claims, and
an ever-expanding art market very confidently reconfigures their material
status and value. If conceptual art permanently asks the question “What is
art?”, it also draws attention to how the whereabouts of the work can be
located in the frameworks that support it. So what is the difference? To ask
how one can know the dancer from the dance is an enabling question.
References
Baldwin, Michael, and Mel Ramsden. 1997. Memories of the medicine show. Art-
Language, New Series 2: 32–49.
Cockcroft, Eva. 1974. Abstract expressionism, weapon of the cold war. Artforum
12(10): 39–41.
Drucker, Johanna. 1994. The visible word: Experimental typography and modern
art, 1909–1923. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gray, Camilla. 1986. The Russian experiment in art: 1863–1922, rev. ed. London:
Thames and Hudson.
Lippard, Lucy, and John Chandler. 1968. The dematerialization of art. Art
International 12(2): 31–36.
Osborne, Peter. 1997. Conference discussion. Healthy alienation: Conceptualism
and the new British art, the Tate Gallery, London, June 13. Audio recording
available from the Tate Library TAV 1781A.
CHAPTER 2
Parallels Between Art and Language
For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ

the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a
word is its use in the language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, §43; original emphasis)
2.1 Opening Remarks

The relation between art and language can be understood in a number of
ways. Art can be considered as a kind of language—the language of expres-
sion and emotions; or one can begin the philosophical examination of the
category of art by turning to the word “art”, its meaning and use. An
extension of the latter is to examine how meaning is structured by consid-
ering the semiotics of the artwork or of art as a system; or one may choose
to focus on the relation of art to discourse and examine how art is talked
about in different historical and social contexts. A fifth, more contempo-
rary way of doing things is to consider verbal and visual representations in
context and how meaning is realised in multimodal communication.
The following discussion reviews some of the main conceptual and meth-
odological parallels made between art and language and examines key con-
cepts about the category of art, theorisations of the system of art and modes
of engaging with the object of art. Many of the debates discussed here are

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5_2
16 E. KALYVA
historically relevant to the production of conceptual art, and many return in

consequent discussions about it. A central debate concerns the universal sta-
tus of art and its unmediated aesthetic experience, and how the autonomy
of the art-object becomes an ontological qualifier for the category of art to
which that object belongs. These premises were defended by the modernist
art theory and challenged by analytic philosophy; in turn, many conceptual
artists employed the latter’s attention to the use of language as part of their
critique of the former. Other ways of understanding how art communicates
and functions in social context, which were historically available or lend
themselves to the analysis of works that use image and text, include speech
acts, semiotics and discourse analysis. As the following discussion will show,
the presence of language in a visual art context lies at the blind spot of the
modernist art discourse. Addressing the relation between art and language,
therefore, helps to reach into the heart of the debate: safeguarding the ideo-
logical investments made in the category of art, on the one hand, or under-
standing the processes of interpreting its objects, on the other.
2.2 From Expression Theory to the Institutional

Theory of Art
One of the most consistent philosophical problems is the possibility
of accessing a fundamentally objective and universal truth. In Western
metaphysics since Plato, the idea of art has been taken to exist prior to
its material manifestation. How, then, does the experience of art lead, if
it does at all, to that idea? The Enlightenment abandoned the imitation
theory of art according to which art merely reflected nature, and placed
order and reason at the centre of the enquiry. Art became the language
of universal expression, but also gained universal value. The artist was
seen as possessing a privileged subjectivity—the artistic genius—that
allowed a superior view of the material and noumenal world, and was
able to reconcile ideals with their particular expression in individual
forms. Immanuel Kant (1952 [1790]) maintained that the recognisa-
bility of art as art offered the pleasure of exercising one’s judgement a
priori of the feelings that were bound up with a given representation
(what he calls “taste”)—these feelings, nonetheless, had universal com-
municability. This recognisability also made one understand that one
had common sense (what Kant calls “a sensus communis”)—sense of
PARALLELS BETWEEN ART AND LANGUAGE 17
elonging to the human community. This in turn functioned as a moral

b
qualifier for art. The concept of the “aesthetic”, therefore, used to des-
ignate a kind of object, judgement, attitude, experience or value, does
not only refer to something that is universal but also to something that
is morally good. As such, it acquires an ideological function. As Terry
Eagleton (1990) explains, the aesthetic becomes instrumental in shap-
ing the self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie as a sovereign class.
Based on this tradition, art is regarded as the language of feelings and
expression beyond cognition; a language distinct from that of logic and
capable of offering particular access to knowledge and to the world. In the
early twentieth century, Benedetto Croce (1922 [1909]) tried to bring
together logic and the aesthetic in a theory of expression. Croce, as well as
C.J. Ducasse and R.G. Collingwood, correlated art with intuitive knowledge,
the immediate signification of feelings and ideas, and creative imagination.
Their understanding adhered to the idealist tradition according to which
an idea, understood as a unit of complete and stable meaning, pre-exists its
manifestation through which it can be conveyed. As Collingwood argued,
“The work of art proper is something not seen or heard, but something
imagined” (1938, 142); and for Ducasse (1929), feelings are expressed in
artworks the same way that meaning is expressed in words. In both cases,
those feelings and that meaning were considered as carriers of truth. From a
different perspective, Susanne Langer (1942) examined the human capacity
to understand symbols and argued that art is capable of articulating feelings
in form through wordless abstraction beyond the linguistic realm.
The premise that there is a universal idea of art that can be accessed
through individual manifestations evaluated by their aesthetic qualities
became central in literary and art criticism in the 1940s. For the formalists,
there was a suitable, so-called “significant” form that the autonomous
art-object could attain, a form capable of provoking the imagination and
evoking feelings and ideas. Such feelings and ideas were acceptable as
long as the concerns of the art-object remained metaphysical rather than
social or political.
2.2.1 Logical Problems with Expression Theory

The enquiry of Ludwig Wittgenstein into language use, and the develop-
ment of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the first half of the
twentieth century challenged the categorical relation of language to truth.
By extension, it also challenged the understanding of art as a kind of language
18 E. KALYVA
that had access to a universal truth or to some intrinsic knowledge about the
world. While discussions around language involved the different extensions
of the Greek word “logos” that means speech, logic, cause, purpose, ratio
as well as, with a capital “L”, divine speech and God’s absolute truth, phi-
losophers of this school of thought argued that language can no longer be
held accountable for moral truth. On the contrary, it is understood as a tool
of cognition that develops historically. As such, the knowledge about the
world that language conveys can no longer be considered as existing in an
infallible state of consciousness but must be measured against the world—for
example, by a theory of reference (Ayer 1955).
This line of enquiry caused a corresponding shift in thought. Rather
than contemplating the relation between a particular manifestation and
a universal concept (and, in the case of art, the evaluation of a signifi-
cant art form that is capable of intuitively bridging the two), attention
shifted to a cognitive “how”: how the problem of knowledge and experi-
ence is structured in language. Philosophical problems, therefore, must
be reconsidered through the logical analysis of language. This approach
accounts for cultural and historical specificity, and renders meaningless
(in the strict sense of the word) any metaphysical problems and value
judgements that cannot be proved or disproved by experience (Carnap
1935). As Paul Ziff notes:
Perhaps the most persistent myth in present-day aesthetics is the notion that
when we discuss a work of art we are not talking about a painting but about
some “illusionary” or “imaginary” thing sometimes called the “object of
art” or the “aesthetic object”. (1951, 466)
Let us consider the language used to talk about art. To begin with, one
must scrutinise the generality, and therefore ambiguity, of terms such
as “emotion”, “expression”, “art” and “good” as well as the type of
knowledge that these offer (Bouwsma 1950). Second, even if the art-
object functions as a placeholder for a universal concept (say, beauty),
one can only be particular when talking about that object. Moreover,
if that object gives access to something that is nonetheless universal,
unmediated and intuitively known, what does then one use to qualify it?
The typical example used to illustrate this logical gap is that listening to
opera may make one feel sad but it cannot be said—to be more precise, it
does not follow—that the notes or the orchestra are themselves sad. Thus
how can aesthetic appreciation both support a general, non-empirical
definition of art and qualify all individual artworks?
Joseph Margolis (1976) summarises the paradox of such philosophical

approaches to art: they maintain that what can be cognitively discernible
in the work may not necessarily be directly perceivable in the work, and
that aesthetically relevant considerations may not directly be accessible to
perception but are somehow part of the work. In simple terms, there is
ambiguity in philosophical discussion regarding the limits of the artwork
in relation to its context, its experience and its appreciation. Specifically, if
the concept of the aesthetic is beyond empirical knowledge or cognition,
one has ultimately no idea of how to employ it in order to understand the
object of art (let alone verify it) since meaning precedes expression. At the
end, it may be that all that remains is the aesthetic motive in talking about
art (Isenberg 1949). An alternative, case-specific consideration would be
to regard artworks as physically embodied and culturally emergent entities
(Margolis 1974).
This logical-positivist line of enquiry revealed the insurmountable
demands placed on the object of art as something that somehow relates to
an unverifiable idea and evokes indeterminable emotions in its beholder.
As the basis for a theory of art, the first premise leaves one with little
access to knowledge; and the second with no criteria for the evaluation,
identification or qualification of something as art. As such, the traditional
predisposition to essentialism and to an inaccessible art-in-itself can only
support a tautological description of the category of art.
2.2.2 Towards an Institutional Theory of Art

A second major contribution of Wittgenstein (1953) was his discussion of
games and family resemblance. This formed the basis for a descriptive rather
than a prescriptive theory for art. A prescriptive definition provides the nec-
essary and sufficient conditions of that which it defines, and specifies how
this is distinguished and characterised. The problem, however, is that this
is only possible for closed concepts, as found in logic and mathematics, and
not for empirically descriptive and normative concepts such as art—unless,
that is, one closes them by arbitrarily stipulating the range of their use.
Morris Weitz (1956) demonstrated how different theories of art until
the mid 1950s—including the formalist, intuitionist and emotionalist
theories—select particular focal points and choose the conditions of their
own definitions of art. On the contrary, Weitz argued, the enquiry into
the definition of art should not begin with the question “What is art?” but
rather with the question “What sort of concept is art?” Weitz suggested
that art is an open concept whose conditions of application are amendable,
20 E. KALYVA
corrigible and governed by decisions for its extension to cover particular

cases. In this case, and observing the analytic tradition, the task of theory
is to elucidate the conditions of the correct employment of the concept of
art and its function in use. In other words, one has to look at and see the
applications of the term “art”. By doing so, one can discern strands of
similarities or differences by virtue of which something is called art.
Advancing the understanding of art as an open concept rather than
seeking its essential definition, Arthur Danto (1964) proposed that art
can be understood on the basis of a logical association of certain quali-
fying predicates. These predicates are used to identify something as art,
and constitute respective theories of art that designate and distinguish
art-objects from other types of objects. Specifically, they are functionable
within what Danto calls the “artworld”—a concept that includes theories
and histories of art. As he argues:
What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of
art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that
takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real
object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification).
Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to
see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic
theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York
painting. (Danto 1964, 581; original emphasis)
The importance of Danto’s thesis is that it departs from the formalist and
ahistorical consideration of artistic quality as transcending particularity, and
draws attention to the historical knowledge of the social networks of art. For
Danto, artistically relevant predicates are not predefined concepts. Rather,
they can be identified at different historical stages by different theories, and
summarised in a matrix of compatibility that identifies particular definitions
of “art”. Consider, for example, F and G. At a given time, these and their
opposites are considered the only art-relevant predicates in critical use. Using
“+” to indicate the presence of that predicate and “−” its absence, their pos-
sible combinations in a specific artwork can only be, Danto explains:
F ++−−
G+−+−
However, it is also possible that something is considered an artwork prior

to establishing G as an artistically relevant predicate. In this case, non-G
might also be predicable of artworks. This means that neither G nor non-
G can be held as defining traits. This is what allows, Danto (1964) main-
tains, a black square painting by Ad Reinhardt to be artistically as rich as
a painting by Titian.
Danto’s theory supports an open concept of art based on the evaluation
and re-evaluation of different traits of artworks as these become ascribed to
the category of art in its historical development. What is more, it exposes
the tendency within art theory for a double uniformity: individual theories
with reference to other theories as a whole, and individual newly identified
art traits with reference to other, already established traits. This means that
in the historical process of finding an adequate theory of art as a system of
knowledge, the dilemma is between whether to re-assess all art in the face
of every new addition of acceptable traits, or to accept that partial defini-
tions will exist, which apply to certain groups of artworks but not to oth-
ers. However, this flexibility of definition cannot be only limited to talking
about art. Since theories shape and define our understanding of art, a certain
apprehension of art pre-exists the production and reception of artworks.
Danto’s artworld may offer a systemic understanding of how the artworld
operates, but what qualifies something as a trait of art in the first place?
Discussing the artifactuality of artworks, George Dickie (1969) further
developed the institutional theory of art. He proposed that an artwork is,
in the descriptive sense, “(1) an artefact (2) upon which some society or some
sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation”
(1969, 254; original emphasis). Accordingly, what is required for something
to be considered as art is, first, that it is conferred candidature for being an
art-object. This requires an appropriate act. Second, one must secure the
approval and corresponding treatment of that object by the artist, the critic
and the gallery owner. In other words, the claim that something is art must
be supported by an institutional setting. For this reason, Dickie (1969)
explains with reference to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a salesman
of plumbing supplies could not have done what Duchamp did. Therefore,
to consider an object as art is the result of the position that it occupies
within an institutional framework or context (Dickie 1995 [1984]).
The institutional theory of art allows us to understand art as a social
system that interacts with other social systems. At the same time, this
system evolves towards its own self-organisation and internal definition
of its constituent parts, and strives to uphold its market and reputation
(Luhmann 2000). Notwithstanding, the need to secure an ontology of
art as well as a standard for its recognition is obstinate. Critics of the
institutional theory have argued that one may indicate how the label
22 E. KALYVA
“artwork” has been assigned but not what art is (cf. Beardsley 1976;
Wollheim 1987). This demand for an ontological definition of art also
expresses the anxiety of evaluating something as art when it is not, and of
not recognising something as art when it is. Beyond philosophical circles,
the importance of the recognition of what is or isn’t art is clearly marked
by the profit to be made by this distinction. That said, concerns were
raised regarding the circularity in Dickie’s definitions (Stecker 1989) and
its reconsideration called attention to the narratives involved in art’s iden-
tification (Carroll 1994).
To summarise the debates so far: Is that which can be aesthetically
appreciated part of the artwork or a symptom of its context? Can art not
exist beyond its artworld-container? Is there a definitive state of affairs that
characterises the artworld and a “pool” of art-qualifiers that might not yet
be employed but that are universal nonetheless? Without empirical data,
such questions remain meaningless. In his later work, Danto (1981) pro-
posed two necessary conditions for a philosophical definition of art: that
the artwork possesses meaning and that it embodies its meaning rather
than merely representing it. This means that the artwork guides its under-
standing by eliciting a mode of interpretation that will lead to its intended
meaning.
If no pre-existing meaning can be supported other than meaning in
use, the act of defining something also entails making an evaluation of that
which is considered to be pertinent to that definition. From this perspec-
tive, art is a criterion not a discovery (McDonald 1970 [1949]). This means
that it is not only a matter of saying that something is art (a driftwood or
a chimpanzee drawing, to recall Weitz (1956) and Dickie (1969)); or of
simply intending to produce art (to follow a certain tradition, to meticu-
lously copy a masterpiece). In order for the concept of art to be able to
support the requirements, ideological or otherwise, that different agents
place on it, there must be a process of qualification that is publically vali-
dated and carried out accordingly.1 Evaluation functions within appropri-
ate and corresponding contexts that support a pre-conception of the term
“art” and prescribe what can be considered as art. This idea formed a
point of entry for many conceptual artists and was incorporated into their
critique of the institution of art. As Wittgenstein reminds us, following a
rule is to participate in a social institution:
1
This understanding of consensus and a community of users becomes a central premise in
the study of language use and speech act theory. Cf. Chapter 3.
“obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to

obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”: otherwise
thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.
(1953, §202; original emphasis)
2.3 Art as a Social Phenomenon. Semiotics

and Ideology
While the above discussions were to occupy much of the Anglo-Saxon

philosophical tradition, revolutionary Russian thinkers from the early
twentieth century had rejected the metaphysical interests of the bourgeoi-
sie and sought to reconnect art with social life. Specifically, they advocated
the social and historical dimensions of art and language as cultural activi-
ties. Such advanced ideas progressively reached the western metropolitan
centres and formed the basis for a rigorous examination of the role of
language, literature and visual culture in capitalist society.
In Art and Social Life, G.V. Plekhanov (1953 [1912]) argues that art
not only offers representations of social life but is also a means for their
critique; its qualification, therefore, depends on a sum of knowledge that
derives from the society wherein that social life is actualised. However,
since social consciousness is historically shaped by social conditions, art is
subject to the trends and psychological conditions of particular societies.
For this reason, Plekhanov continues, the critic should consider the ele-
ments of a particular society that are expressed in an artwork and translate
those ideas from the language of art to the language of sociology.
Regarding language, V.N. Vološinov (1973 [1929]) underlines the
social function and interactive nature of verbal utterances, and asserts that
utterances must be studied in their dialogical exchange in verbal com-
munication. Accordingly, the sign is determined by communication that,
in effect, is ideological. As Vološinov explains, from an epistemological
point of view, the sign is the materialisation of communication, whereas
meaning is a function of the sign as a social phenomenon. This also means
that the sign is not arbitrary, ahistorical or isolated from the social process.
Vološinov specifically criticised Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1959 [1916])
method of analysis and understanding of the sign as an arbitrary com-
pound of a signifier and a signified. He detected a Cartesian fallacy in
de Saussure’s distinction between linguistic performance (parole) and
24 E. KALYVA
abstract linguistic system (langue), and instead maintained that the sign is
dynamic and becomes part of consciousness, which is the product of social
interaction in its historical development.
Another key contribution to the analysis of literature, language and
visual culture is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogic imagination”.
Bakhtin (1981 [1934–35]), whose work was only translated into English
in the late 1960s, demonstrated that meaning is actualised by use in the
process of communication. Specifically, meaning is constantly created
through interaction in the social process where the speaker adjusts to con-
text and formulates her utterance in relation to what is being talked about,
to whom the utterance is addressed and according to the model that she
thinks she will be understood (Bakhtin 1986 [1959–61]).
These critical reflections from revolutionary Russia transformed the
focal point of the analysis of culture and its products. Rather than seek-
ing to define a stable or universal truth, analysis shifted to the social and
historical processes that structure and establish meaning, as well as our
understanding of the world.
Utilising this critical framework, the Prague linguistic circle, active in
the interwar years, examined the function of different elements within lan-
guage and the function of language in relation to other systems. It equally
contested the classical structuralism of de Saussure and underlined the
importance of the social function of language. Employing these premises
on the semiotic study of art, Jan Mukařovský explains that:
The objective study of the phenomena of “art” is directed to the work of

art as a sign composed of a sensuous symbol created by the artist, of a signi-
fication (that is, aesthetic object) laid down in the collective consciousness,
and of a relation to the signified thing, the relation that refers to the total
context of social phenomena. (1976 [1934], 6)
The development of semiotics offered a new method of relating the con-

stituent parts of a set (a sentence, a text) and of bridging meaning with
use within an interpretive community. Across the Atlantic, Charles S. Peirce
theorised that the sign is in a dynamic relationship to both the denoted
thing and to the mind. Peirce proposed a triangular, dialectical relation-
ship across three basic semiotic elements: the sign (representamen) that
stands in for something else; the object (referent) for which the sign stands
in; and that which is created in the mind of a person (interpretant) (1940
[1893/1910]). Peirce determined up to ten classes of signs according to
three interconnected trichotomies that account for the sign itself (qualisign,
sinsign, legisign), its interpretant (rheme, dicisign or dicent sign, argument),
and the relation of the sign to its object and to its interpretant (icon, sym-
bol, index). (Note that in Peirce’s system not all combinations are permis-
sible.) The typology icon-symbol-index is the most widely applied.
An icon physically resembles what it stands in for but has no dynamic
connection with the object it represents. A symbol conventionally bears a
rule for its interpretation but does not have any physical resemblance to
or a dynamic connection with its object. It cannot indicate any particular
thing either, but rather denotes a kind or type of thing. On the contrary,
an index is physically connected with its object; that is, it has a correlation
in space and time. As mentioned above, these classes are not exclusive
but determine different aspects or qualities of the signs and their use.
A typical example is the weathercock: it is iconic of a male chicken, could
be considered a symbol of rusticity and is indexical of the direction of the
wind. In this typology, only the icon possesses the character that renders
it significant even without the existence of the object. The index loses its
character if its object is removed since the interpreting mind has nothing
to do with this connection, and the symbol is connected with its object
by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind, without which such con-
nection would not exist (Peirce 1940 [1893/1910]).
As such, not only communication but also interpretation and under-
standing are now specified as dynamic processes. The sign can perform dif-
ferent functions depending on context and application while its cognitive
interpretation always gives birth to another sign. As Peirce explains, the
sign “produces a certain idea in the mind which is the idea that it is a sign
of the thing it signifies and an idea is itself a sign, for an idea is an object
and it represents an object” (1986 [1873], 67–68). This is true especially
for symbols, Peirce (1940 [1893/1910]) notes, that grow and spread, and
develop out of other signs, particularly icons. For this reason, one must
consider the chain of signs rather than any stable duality between an object
and an idea. Contrary to de Saussure and in agreement with Vološinov,
Peirce (1885) also maintains that the sign is “motivated” rather than arbi-
trary in the sense that there is a rationale behind the choice of the signifier.
2.3.1 A Semiotics of Visual Culture

Since art had been traditionally considered to be a type of language, it
soon followed that the same rules should apply for its analysis. By the
1960s, the semiotic and social understanding of how meaning is produced
was taken from the analysis of language and literature and applied in the
analysis of visual culture.
26 E. KALYVA
Roland Barthes initiated a systematic analysis of images and texts in

their social and discursive context. In his seminal work Mythologies (1972
[1957]), a collection of articles first published in the French literary maga-
zine Les Lettres Nouvelles, Barthes undertook a critique of the language of
culture and the ideological uses of language. Writing over a period of sev-
eral years, his examples ranged from a margarine advertisement to the
cover of the popular magazine Paris Match. Barthes explains how signs are
established through repetition and how cultural signification is entangled
in a system of myths. The concept of myth is a useful tool in understand-
ing how discourse and ideologies function in capitalist societies through
images and texts. Barthes specifies the myth as a type of language, a system
of communication in social use and verbalised through discourse. From a
semiological perspective, the myth’s signifier is language (that is, the use
of language and the signs that in turn are composed of their own signi-
fieds and signifiers), while the myth’s signified lies outside language (it is
a meta-language) (Fig. 2.1).
In terms of its social function, we can understand myth as an appropriated
and naturalised language that is constructed with specific objectives, and
that is used and consumed; it is, effectively, depoliticised speech (Barthes
1972 [1957]). Let us return to the cover of Paris Match. Published in
1955 during the Algerian anticolonial War of Independence, it featured an
African boy in French military uniform who is saluting. As Barthes explains,
this image exemplifies the myth of France as a great Empire. Rather than
presenting her as an oppressor, it portrays France as presumably embrac-
ing all of her sons without any discrimination by colour—they, in turn,
appear to faithfully serve her. Moreover, Barthes underlines, that this image
was circulated and consumed unproblematically by the public is one of the
fundamental ways through which imperialism is established (Barthes 1972
[1957], 115ff.).
I. Signifier 2. Signified
Language 3. Sign
MYTH I SIGNIFIER II SIGNIFIED
III SIGN
Fig. 2.1 The relation between language and myth according to Roland Barthes
(Reproduced from Barthes 1972)
Regarding the relation between image and text, Barthes emphasises

that to ask whether painting is a language is already an ethical question:
we have not been able to establish either painting’s lexicon or its general
grammar—to put the picture’s signifiers on one side and its signified on
the other, and to systematize their rules of substitution and combination
[because of the] old humanist superstition that artistic creation cannot be
“reduced” to a system: system, as we know, is the declared enemy of man
and of art. (1985 [1969], 49)
Even though the image is institutionally separated from the text and one
cannot “apply” language to a picture, Barthes argues, one can eliminate
their distance. In his analysis, Barthes (1977a [1971]) demonstrates how
the text is a methodological field, plural, paradoxical, caught up in a pro-
cess of filiation and restored to language. He moreover transposes this con-
sideration to the realm of the visual and contests the presumed neutrality
of the image. Paying attention to the various rhetorical elements of the
image, Barthes suggests three types of relation between image and text:
anchorage, where the text elucidates the image; illustration, where the
image realises the text; and relay, where image and text are equal (Barthes
1977b [1964], 1977c [1961]).
Furthermore, Barthes (1977b [1964]) proposes a typology for the
message that textual and visual representations convey. In this typology,
he differentiates between the linguistic message and two types of iconic
message: the iconic, non-codified, denoted or “literal” message; and the
iconic, codified, connoted or “symbolic” message. Consider any adver-
tisement, let us say that of a family car. The linguistic message will be the
brand logo and any catch phrase such as “safety and comfort without
compromise”. The iconic, denoted, literal message is what one sees as
unreflectively as possible. For example, a happy nuclear family consisting
of a well-groomed man, an attractive blonde woman and a laughing tod-
dler driving away together. The iconic, connoted, symbolic message will
be what this image conveys: leisure, wealth, prosperity and social stand-
ing, but also a consumerist culture, social values based on possession and
recognition, race and gender power structures and so forth. The extent to
which one unproblematically takes in information and when one begins
to critically reflect on that information is precisely the point in question.
Together with the concept of myth, Barthes’s attention to the work-
ings of ideology is one of his most important contributions to the analy-
sis of visual culture. He particularly examines the processes of naturalisation
28 E. KALYVA
through which a message is taken as given or as natural—as in the case of

the cover of Paris Match discussed earlier—and through which we become
saturated and no longer able to read between the lines. As Barthes explains,
“the common realm of the signified of connotation is that of ideology”
(1977b [1964], 49; original emphasis). Thus there is no “natural” lan-
guage untouched by ideology. The activity of reading and viewing is always
conditioned, and to explain how this takes effect is the task of analysis.
Barthes’s work on semiotics and ideology led to reconsiderations in
the analysis of how different art forms convey meaning. Rather than iso-
lating the artwork from context and only addressing its internal mecha-
nisms in the formalist-structuralist tradition, analyses in the late 1960s and
1970s incorporated Marxist dialectics, showing how social processes and
real life conditions shape, in their historical development, not only the
cultural and intellectual activities but also consciousness and understand-
ing (see the base-superstructure dialectical relationship; cf. p.182). Such
analyses demonstrated that meaning is conditioned by the materiality of
the artwork, the mode of its production (including art tradition) and its
reception—or, more appropriately, consumption. Signs cannot be held as
having any stable or eternal meaning and to maintain that they do, is itself
an ideological position. Rather, viewing and reading are part of a social
process of signification, which is governed by certain power structures
and reproduces the ideological subject. Regarding cinema, Peter Wollen
(1969) examines the structure of meaning (or, after Barthes, the struc-
turation of meaning as a process) in film against its historical and political
background. Likewise in photography, reading is never neutral and one
cannot ignore the politics of interpretation and representation (Sontag
1967 [1964]; Edwards 1990).
To return to conceptual art for a moment, even though semiotics
have been used by artists such as Victor Burgin, Martha Rosler, David
Lamelas and Carlos Ginzburg particularly in order to criticise the con-
sumerist and patriarchal capitalist society, a semiological analysis of con-
ceptual art is not readily available. Looking to the Spanish-speaking world
however, there are two exceptions: Victoria Combalía (1975) and Simón
Marchán Fiz (1972). Influenced by the semiological-sociological analysis
of Umberto Eco, their analysis brought art’s social and political exten-
sions into focus and examined the artwork within the continuum of social
semiosis. The field of semiosis consists of the syntactic (relations between
signs), the semantic (relations between signs and their sense) and the prag-
matic (relations between signs and users); here, any object can function as
a sign when its presence enables one to take into account something that
is not present (Morris 1971 [1938]). Under this framework, Combalía
and Marchán Fiz discuss conceptual art within its socio-cultural context as
part of a system of communication, and highlight the need to understand
the dialectics of the conceptual artwork: how context shapes its produc-
tion and understanding, and how in turn the work shapes and can change
that context. Especially in the historical context of Cold War paranoia
and imperialist exploitation, this allows one to consider how artworks find
new ways of expression that are not yet assimilated by ideology (Combalía
1975) and can support an alternative to the American cultural colonisation
(Marchán Fiz 1972). Indeed, many conceptual art practices initiated an
enquiry into the dialectics of the artwork, which helped redefine the social
function of art and re-evaluate the hegemonic tendencies of art history.
2.3.2 A Social History of Art

It was mentioned earlier that the American modernist art discourse was the
predominant way of talking about and doing art. This means that it was not
the only one. Influenced by the Russian intellectual and artistic avant-garde,
the second half of the twentieth century saw the development of the social his-
tory of art. Following the Marxist tradition, the social history of art opposed
formalism and its ideological investments in the aesthetic and the artistic
genius. It rejected the neutrality of representation, and turned attention to the
social and discursive processes of production of both artworks and their read-
ing. Arnold Hauser (1951) proposed a dialectical and social understanding of
art, which examines the form and content of artworks as these develop his-
torically and in relation to the material and cultural conditions of their time.
As such, artworks are not irrelevant to ideologies but express and reproduce
them. Likewise, interpretation is a historical and cultural activity. With this in
mind, T.J. Clark (1973) explained that a social history of art does not depend
on intuitive analogies between form and ideological content. It does not treat
history as a “background” to, but as essentially absent from, the work’s pro-
duction; nor does it hold the artist’s point of reference as being a priori of the
artistic community. As a method of analysis, it interrogates the production
and reception of artworks, and the connections across artistic form, available
systems of visual representation, theories of art, ideologies, social classes and
more general historical structures and processes (Clark 1973).
30 E. KALYVA
2.4 Art Systems and the Art Historical

Discourse
Marking new developments within philosophy, Nelson Goodman
(1968) approached language as a symbol system and developed a paral-
lel consideration of art as a language. Aiming for a theory of notation for
art including music and dance, Goodman proposed understanding art as
a semiotic system based on the principles of unambiguity, and of syntactic
and semantic disjointness and differentiation. His approach scrutinises the
referentiality of images and instead reads them as texts in order to detect
the structuration of meaning. Goodman was particularly interested in the
crucial difference between pictorial and verbal properties (and between
non-linguistic and linguistic symbols or systems) that forms the difference
between representation in general and description (Goodman 1968, 42).
Notably, Goodman places denotation at the core of any system of repre-
sentation and, radically departing from traditional theories of art, does not
consider resemblance a necessary condition. Foregrounding the impor-
tance of association by reference in the process of making sense is what
allows Goodman to bring together textual (i.e. non-pictorial) and picto-
rial systems of notation. What does then happen to expression and artis-
tic creativity? For Goodman, expression is always relevant and contextual;
likewise, representation is not an innate quality of a particular medium but
derives from processes of selection, organisation, rejection, prioritisation,
classification and construction of meaning. As for artistic creativity, it may
be that the rules of representation are defined by tradition, convention and
the viewing community, Goodman maintains, but art has the potential to
change and redefine these rules.
Methodologically speaking, approaching the visual as semioticians did the
textual presents certain difficulties. One has to do with clearly demarcat-
ing connotation from denotation (Baker 1985). Furthermore, one can still
maintain that a priori concepts reside behind appearances on the grounds
that the recognisability of schemata attests to a deeper structure of meaning
and, via Kant’s sensus communis, to the universality of aesthetic apprehension
which becomes the criterion of that recognisability. Yet the same argument
of a priori concepts and deeper structures of meaning has been made for
language and logic. One must therefore consider how this meaning is struc-
tured. Thus one speaks of meaning making as a process rather than of any a
priori meaning, and of reading and viewing as processes of association and
of making sense. While meaning may not be fully intended or exhausted, the
acts of reading and viewing are not anarchic. Likewise, while the renewability
of meaning makes knowledge possible, this does not mean that there are no
structural and specifically ideological processes that systematise and regu-
late knowledge and cultural production. To return to a previous example,
one may be able to take plumbing supplies into a gallery but these must
be validated by the artworld to be considered art. Likewise, a gallery audi-
ence may consist of different social groups but this does not mean that their
response to art is not guided by prevailing narratives and acceptable social
behaviours.
By the mid 1970s, there was a significant amount of scholarship on the
ideological motivation behind the production of images and how these
are used and theorised. It was a period of wider changes in the social and
political sphere, revolutionary struggles and students’ and workers’ move-
ments, but also state repression and propaganda. What had been identified
as the grand narratives of modernism and of the idealist tradition p revailed,
but they were no longer left unchallenged. While the social history of art
developed in the UK, the work of W.J.T. Mitchell in the US was crucial
in the study of the history of art and the relation between images and
words. Initiating an enquiry into what the discursive distinguishability of
images from words put at stake, Mitchell (1974, 1987) examined the poli-
tics of inscription, the ideological interpretation of images in its historical
development and the types of convention in talking about art as a system.
For Mitchell, there is no semantic neutrality of the pictorial surface, which
is subject to material and cultural practices, a community of recognition
and ideologically invested interpretations. He notes paradigmatically:
“language and imagery are no longer what they promised to be for the
critics and philosophers of the Enlightenment—perfect, transparent media
through which reality may be represented to the understanding” (1987,
83). The same way that a text can have different readings, so can an image.
Mitchell specifically underlines that apart from how meaning in images is
conditioned, their analyses are conditioned as well, developing historically
and corresponding to and articulating different interests.
Let us consider an example of how reading practices furnish signs with
meaning—an example that Mitchell also discusses. If one is presented with
the images of an eye and a saw and asked to articulate what one sees, one
would say “eye saw”, which sounds like “I saw”. Since the latter has a
different meaning from what these images independently denote, one is
prompted to reflect on how the systems of reading and viewing are con-
structed. Of course, this example only works in English and there is a cer-
tain historical process through which the notation of phonetic alphabets
develops towards abstraction. Yet, like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, this
example is adequate in drawing attention to how reading conventions and
32 E. KALYVA
visual recognition are interlinked, and how the former might guide the
latter—an understanding that contests the claims for the intrinsic or univer-
sal recognisability of images. (In Peircian terms, one would detect an over-
lap between the icon [drawings of objects on paper] and the symbol [words
that refer to a past activity of an agent]; or better, one would observe how
the icon also becomes a symbol, since symbols, for Peirce, grow and spread
among users.) It is important here not to conflate all types of visual signs in
order to draw an analogy or build a contrast between the visual and the lin-
guistic. In any case, one can no longer ignore the conventions that govern
different systems and the “pools” of contextual information that shape and
“motivate” meaning.
Revisiting Goodman’s thesis, Norman Bryson (1988) contested the
linearity of nature-representation-recognition when talking about art as a
visual system and the idea that there is some inherent meaning to pictorial
representation waiting to be decoded. Bryson was particularly interested
in demonstrating that there is no singular relation between the viewer and
the painting. He argues, after Karl Popper, that without the instructions
that indicate what is to be observed, observation cannot begin (Bryson
1983). For this reason, it is important to examine the social and interac-
tive character of the image as a sign and how it behaves within different
systems of beliefs and conventions, and as part of different discursive, eco-
nomic and political practices.
As we have seen so far, meaning is something that is created rather than
something inherent. This is true for both images and texts as cultural arte-
facts. How, then, is one to talk about them? In light of this question, Mieke
Bal and Bryson (1991) introduced the concept of a narrative semiotics of
art. They suggested a new way of analysing visual narrative in context, and
drew attention to how that context is historically shaped but also how it
is produced by art historical discourse. Context, Bal and Bryson explain,
is a text itself, and it thus consists of signs that require interpretation. What
we take to be a positive knowledge is the product of interpretive choices.
The art historian is always present in the construction she or he produces.
(1991, 175)
Bal (1990) further examined the focalisation of meaning, the male gaze
and the ideological positioning of the subject in terms of the represented
figure, as well as of the viewer and of the artist. Thus it is not a mat-
ter of simply applying narratological concepts in the analysis of a work
of art, but of scrutinising the confrontation between the narratological
apparatus and the visual image, as well as considering the kind of story
that the visual representation produces. Likewise, the feminist critique of
art and of art history draws our attention to the instances when the work
of art confronts traditional interpretations of art and its subject; and to
the “naturalisation” of viewing from a privileged, heterosexual, white and
male position. For Griselda Pollock, “To deprive the bourgeoisie not of
its art but of its concept of art, this is the precondition of a revolutionary
argument” (1982, 18).
Still, one might say, understanding how signs and codes—visual or
textual—are structured may have reshuffled the order of reading the
visual; it may have also rearranged the “system” of art, its applications
and historical-social dimensions. But, the argument continues, this does
not tell us anything further regarding the nature of the work of art or its
capacity to affect us. This, however, is not quite true. Understanding the
“how” contributes greatly to understanding the “why”. While this “why”
may have initially derived from an inability to explain the phenomenon
at hand, more often than not it keeps returning as intellectual trouble
because of the fear that, if art and language are systemically examined and
the networks that support and validate them are brought to the surface,
there will be no room left for the values that they have been assigned. In
the historical state of affairs of the 1960s, the demand to invest in the dis-
interested art-object and its private contemplation became more pressing
than ever. This was supported by hegemonic cultural practices and the cult
of the expert critic who advocated a universal aesthetic while combating
any critical, social or political extensions of art. For these reasons, a rigor-
ous analysis of image and text juxtapositions must consider what is at stake
when discussing the visual in relation to the textual. It must also consider
habitual modes of viewing and the discourse of art history. Juxtapositions
create moments of dissonance and new ways to reflect on and challenge
the traditions of production, evaluation and theorisation of art, and the
hierarchies of value and meaning that run through them.
2.5 New Perspectives from Socio-Linguistics:

Discourse Analysis and Multimodality
Discourse analysis focuses on communication and the social production
of ideology and power. It was developed in the late 1960s and 1970s at
the University of Birmingham alongside cultural studies, while critical
34 E. KALYVA
linguistics developed at the University of East Anglia based on M.A.K.

Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. These fields drew resources from
Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse, French structuralism, the work of
Barthes, Bakhtin, Vološinov and the Prague School, and Marxism, femi-
nism and critical theory (Threadgold 2003). Rather than considering signs
as static entities, discourse analysis examines the material and historical
dimensions of representation, how meaning is determined by social con-
ventions and power structures, and what is achieved by the communica-
tional act. The text is considered as an instance of linguistic interaction
within a socio-semiotic process, and context itself is understood as a social
construct—context in the sense of what is considered to be the relevant
field of interpretation. With this in mind, one speaks of meaning-making
and of language in operation.
The term critical discourse analysis has also been introduced to indicate
the wider interest in the analysis of culture beyond the linguistic text.
Norman Fairclough (1995) draws from Bakhtin’s discussion of hetero-
glossia in the novel and of the text as a space of tension (Bakhtin 1981
[1934–35]), and argues that heterogeneity in the text codifies social con-
tradictions. This interest in social interaction, power and ideology becomes
central in critical discourse analysis. Utilising interdisciplinary methods,
and tools and concepts from linguistics such as cohesion, conjunction
and inter-semiotic relations, this method of analysis can be applied for the
examination of different types of cultural artefacts such as texts, paintings,
music pieces, advertisements and newspaper articles.
Halliday (1978) had demonstrated that language can be understood as a
social semiotic system—a premise that this book will use; and further devel-
oped his systemic functional approach to linguistic analysis. Departing from
traditional linguistics, Halliday proposes four interlinked strata of analysis:
context, semantics, lexico-grammar (concerning the syntactic organisa-
tion of words into utterances) and phonology-graphology. Context here
is understood as being in a dialogical relation to the unfolding of the lan-
guage event. It concerns the field (what is being talked about), the tenor
(the interpersonal relations and social roles of those involved—the “who”)
and the mode (the “how” or format of communication—i.e. textual, audio
etc.). Systemic semantics is divided into three components: ideational
(the propositional content), interpersonal (concerned with speech-function,
expression of attitude etc.) and textual (concerned with how the text is
structured, its theme and rhetorical structure). Thus while languages and
their uses vary, they all serve certain functions in society and participate in
social life. Halliday calls these the “metafunctions of language”, which inter-
relate context and semantics: the ideational, which, with its experiential and
logical components, relates to the context’s field and refers to the resources
that a language offers for expression and how these are selected and com-
bined; the interpersonal, which relates to the context’s tenor and refers to
how languages enact social relations; and the textual, which relates to the
context’s mode and refers to how a language enables the flow of discourse
and coherent communication (Halliday 2014 [1985]).
This systemic understanding of communication in context formed the
basis for a new branch of semiotics, social semiotics, and new typologies for
art and visual communication. Social semiotics investigates processes and
practices of signification with reference to the social and cultural context,
and how meaning is constituted in social practice (Hodge and Kress 1988).
In art, Michael O’Toole (1994) proposes a method of analysis of artworks
that acknowledges their context and considers their representational,
compositional and modal meaning (what is represented, how it is com-
posed and how it engages the viewer). Likewise, Gunther Kress and Theo
van Leeuwen (1996) have proposed a grammar of visual design. Based on
the premise that signs are never arbitrary, they locate the “motivation” of
signs in context and in relation to the sign-maker and to their use.
With the rise of new media, the semiotic landscape becomes more com-
plex. In response, the study of multimodality attends to modes of commu-
nication and semiotics other than of language-in-use. This includes images
and page design but also gestures and expressions. Same with traditional
media, multimodal communication is treated as another form of social
interaction grounded in communicative practice and interactivity (Kress
and van Leeuwen 2001; Iedema 2003).
Several typologies have been suggested regarding the relation between
the textual and the visual components of a multimodal text. One, pro-
posed by Radan Martinec and Andrew Salway (2005), builds on the
work of Barthes and Halliday and considers the status of each compo-
nent and their logico-semantics. In terms of status, this can be equal
or unequal, i.e. independent or subordinate, in the case that the one
component modifies the other. In terms of logico-semantic relations,
the two main types are expansion and projection. Expansion is divided
into elaboration (which is further divided into exposition, if image and
text have the same generality, and exemplification, if not), extension and
enhancement (which is further divided into time, place and reason or
purpose). An example of extension is when the caption to an image gives
36 E. KALYVA
additional but related information—e.g. an image of someone arriving at

the airport accompanied by a caption reading that she is flying to Paris. If
expansion concerns the relations between represented events in the non-
linguistic experience, projection concerns events that have already been
represented. It is divided into the case of locution (wording) and idea
(meaning). Comics are a typical example of an equal and complementary
relation between image and text in terms of status, and projection-
locution in terms of logico-semantics (Martinec and Salway 2005).
It may be difficult to reapply such complex typologies in the case of art
and in particular conceptual art which sought to challenge its interpretive
frameworks. Yet they do help us understand how different elements can
participate in the meaning-making process. That said, one must be careful
not to reify the typological categories one uses, which are instrumental to
analysis but not essential to the object of study. Likewise, it is important to
keep in mind that the dichotomies that these produce (a “general” text, a
“complementary” image) are tentative and not independent of their par-
ticular applications. Which is to say, one must be wary of how interpreta-
tion, by pretending to uphold a non-linguistic and therefore neutral reality,
imposes its own language upon the language of that which it interprets
(Silverman and Torode 1980).
2.6 Closing Remarks

The above discussion has outlined four ways of engaging art and language:
the essentialist-idealist tradition of a universal concept of art and of signifi-
cant art forms offering particular access to knowledge; attention to lan-
guage use and a descriptive understanding of the artworld and its agents;
considering art as a social phenomenon and analysing the semiotics of
visual culture and the ideological investments in the art-object; and the
examination of meaning-making processes in multimodal communication.
This survey helps frame the frameworks of analysis that this book proposes
for understanding the critical use of image and text juxtapositions in con-
ceptual art. (These frameworks will be individually presented in their cor-
responding chapters.) It also helps frame the context of conceptual art in
terms of traditional and habitual modes of seeing art.
This discussion has not included applications that concern the plasticity
of words, the visuality of the printed matter and the book as (art-)object,
the relation between poetic and pictorial space, the interaction of visual
elements with narrative structures as these are particularly found in comics,

illustrations, the relation between paintings and their titles, or exchanges
between visual artists and writers (English and Silvester 2004; McGann
1993; Roque and Weber 1994; Saraceni 2003; Welchman 1997).
Traditionally, the binary art/language has been used to make a value
judgement by contrasting language, as underlined by logic and arguably
having an arbitrary correspondence to the world, with art, as offering an
unmediated aesthetic experience. However, the parallel consideration of
art and language can also be used to do something else. First, it offers
the vantage point of understanding visual representation as a culturally
specific mode of communication. Despite the demand for accountability
for universal truth that is present in philosophical examinations of both
language and of art, it cannot be shown that either texts or images have
stable a priori meanings. On the contrary, it can be demonstrated how
these meanings are produced within certain contexts and circulate within
corresponding communities. As such, the act of naming something “art”
(by the philosopher, the critic, the gallery owner, Duchamp or the concep-
tual artist) is already set by and reproduces—or aims to displace—specific
reading and viewing regimes. In other words, denomination and inter-
pretation are cultural practices which are historically developed and sup-
ported by ideological and institutional frameworks.
Second, the parallel between art and language enables the following ques-
tion: Given that different contexts require different uses of language, what
would be a standard and non-standard use for art? This creates a conjecture
because if talking about communities of language users delineates the limits
of semantic relevance, the equivalent acknowledgement of “art users” under-
mines the very universal nature of the aesthetic. This is not only regarding
the aesthetic as a distinct mode of access to knowledge but also as the neces-
sary common denominator for all manifestations of art. To put it differently,
asking what are the limits of the existence of a thing in order for one to differ-
entiate it from its status as art, is to ask whether a limit can be drawn between
a discursive and an ontological consideration of the object in question.
In order to understand how image and text juxtapositions can be
used as part of a critical strategy, one must specify the context of the act.
Context refers to the institutions of art, art traditions and education,
modes of artistic production and consumption, processes of evaluation
and validation, market strategies as well as the political, social and finan-
cial extensions of the work. Things are already given in context and have
no “natural” or independent existence before they become something—
this is the same for plumbing supplies as much as it is for a work of art.
38 E. KALYVA
The examination of the work even via a hermeneutic circle where we pre-
suppose knowledge of the thing that we are trying to understand might
lead to some truth about it (Heidegger 2000 [1936]); and it certainly tells
us a lot about the examiner.
It is said that Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915) was mis-
taken for a snow shovel by his housekeeper and used to clear the snow
from the doorway. The telling of this anecdote illustrates a shift of mean-
ing between different interpretative contexts. By counterpoising what is
assumed to be the layman’s ignorance against the knowledge of those
expert in art matters, this anecdote becomes an insider’s joke. Its telling,
in this case, functions as a confirmation that the conversational participants
share that knowledge. Conversely, consider presenting this odd story to
a non-consenting audience. They might object to the ad hoc differenti-
ation between a tool and a work of art, and observe how the artworld
highly values the nominating power of the author and of the expert. Even
this realisation, however, requires recognising corresponding categories,
value judgements and practices.
In the following chapters, we will see how conceptual artists used lan-
guage in order to manipulate different meaning-making processes, chal-
lenge the limits of semantic relevance, and reveal the ideological structures
and prevailing narratives that keep the concept of “art” in place. They
drew resources from philosophy, art criticism and literature, and engaged
their social and political context and the function of the press. They cre-
ated international networks with exchanges and collaborations, and their
works appeared in galleries, public squares and magazines. In a plurality of
voices and modes of signification, conceptual artists presented their claims
in the guise of something else. By doing so, they sought to demonstrate
the investment in the distinguishability of the art-object and expose the
institutional logic of exclusion.
There is a negative moment of self-critique in these works—a moment
when the provisionality of the act is acknowledged and the limitations of
its enabling categories exposed. By the same token, their analysis must also
reflectively address the discursive effects of its own interpretive frameworks.
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466–480.
CHAPTER 3
The Performative Gesture of Image

and Text Juxtapositions
How visual does visual art have to be?

Keith Arnatt (1997, 47)
3.1 Opening Remarks

Greenbergian formalism defended the unmediated aesthetic experience
of art and in particular the self-referentiality of the artwork, which became
a definitive trait of the artistic production in the 1950s and 1960s.
Exemplified by abstract expressionism, the pictorial surface became the
means to demonstrate the process of painting. Thus the art-object stood
for itself while the subjectivity of the artistic genius was able to relate
the particular (the individual work of art) to the universal (the aesthetic
experience of art as well as the historical development of artistic styles).
For artists who wanted to challenge this framework, the introvert self-
referentiality of modernism was replaced by critical self-reflectivity. Rather
than being satisfied with addressing the work of art as an object, the critical
task of these artists became to bring to the surface those frameworks—and
their respective ideologies and logic of exclusion—that determined what
is understood as the work. For this reason, many conceptual art strategies
involved redirecting the habitual attention of the viewer and interrogat-
ing what one sees. They manipulated the conditions and assumptions of
viewing but also of reading in order to implicate the authoritative voice
of the art critic. To do so, they distorted that art critic’s voice but also

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5_3
44 E. KALYVA
duplicated other languages not usually considered part of the sites within
which art was presented. Through their use of language, conceptual art-
works contested the prioritisation of the visual and of aesthetic apprehen-
sion and negotiated the space of representation across art and language
as a social space.
This chapter examines the performative gesture of artworks that com-
bine image and text. It discusses Keith Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction
(1971, London), Roelof Louw’s Tape-Recorder Project (6) (1971, London
and New York) and the exhibitions Arte de Sistemas I [Art of Systems I]
(1971, Buenos Aires) and Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre [Art and
Ideology/CAYC in the open air] (1972, Buenos Aires) organised by the
Centre of Art and Communication (CAYC)—a centre with extraordinary
national and international projection, even more so because of its historical
circumstances. This chapter considers the use of photography and installa-
tion in staging an event and in inverting the mediation of reality; the effects
of documentation, the role of the archive and institutional discourse; and
the relation between art, violence and political mobilisation. As this chap-
ter will demonstrate, the critical enquiry that conceptual art initiated con-
tinues to be relevant because the systems of reference that it challenged
(the demands placed on the art-object, the duality between the voice of
art criticism and the mute work of art proper, the gallery system and the
ideological separation of art from social life) are still prevalent today.
The concept of the “performative” is not irrelevant to the selected art-
works. Speech act theory was historically available and a point of interest
for many artists. It offered a way of understanding communication as an
interactive process, and acknowledged both the context of the act and its
agents. John Austin published his seminal book How to Do Things with
Words in 1962 based on a series of lectures that he had given at Harvard in
1955. The artworks discussed here were produced in the early 1970s and
challenged the prevailing models for understanding art and its function.
Modernist art discourse, exemplified by the writings of Michael Fried and
Clement Greenberg, defended the linear continuity of artistic tradition as
the organic progression of internally structured forms. It moreover sought
to establish unity between particular artistic manifestations and their prede-
cessors, as well as between a work and the artist’s oeuvre. To do so, modern-
ist art discourse defined a mode of reading the work which nominated the
traits that would qualify it as art and consolidated its understanding based
on a particular type of formal interpretation. This “purified” the work from
any social concerns and based its apprehension exclusively on the experi-
ence of the individual. Modernist art discourse also embraced the traditional
THE PERFORMATIVE GESTURE OF IMAGE AND TEXT JUXTAPOSITIONS 45
nderstanding of art as the language of expression: intuitive, unfiltered by

u
logic and offering insights to greater truths. At the same time, however, and
as was discussed in the previous chapter, studies in the philosophy of lan-
guage shifted away from the demand that language be morally accountable
for truth. Rather than focusing on language’s truth conditions, new scholar-
ship focused on the conditions of its use. It soon followed that interpretation
itself was dependent on and mediated by certain contextual requirements.
As a method of analysis, examining the work’s performative gesture
offers the tools for both a synchronic and diachronic evaluation (that is,
both in its time and from today’s standpoint). Understanding how a work
communicates in context involves understanding how it, as a cultural arte-
fact, engaged its environment, was historically produced and received; it
also means understanding how the work as well as its critical potential are
perceived today. This includes examining how the historiographical dis-
course develops around the work across its lifetime. This type of analysis
requires differentiating between overlapping systems of reference. There
are functional differences between the event, its documentation and its
analysis, which is to say that classification is not self-evident. All items must
be identified as something (visual art, paraphernalia of the production
process, an institutional archive etc.), and therefore become enveloped in
respective discourses. Equally, the present analysis forms another context
through which the performative gesture of the work is located.
Austin’s discussion of the performative is based on two central prem-
ises: that the understanding of utterances depends on their effective and
successful use; and that successful communication is achieved when the
conversation participants share and observe certain conditions. Based on
this, this chapter examines what the constituent parts of an artwork con-
vey in their own pictorial and textual terms and how their juxtaposition
affects the meaning-making process. In the case of Arnatt, the interaction
between the work’s visual and textual elements causes shifts in the habitual
modes of reading and viewing, and creates a tension that threatens the
audience’s spectatorial desires. In Louw’s work, an engaging installation
that was later presented as a series of photographs accompanied by an
explanatory note, documentation creates a new relation between image
and text that distorts the work’s interactive character. In a much more
violent environment during the military dictatorship of 1966–73 in
Argentina, works by artists such as Carlos Ginzburg, Luis Pazos and Juan
Carlos Romero address the unrepresented and the untold through a series
of symbolical and rhetorical shifts that aim to both reclaim public space
and raise awareness.
46 E. KALYVA
Since the performative act requires the acknowledgement and agree-

ment of the participants, to understand its function is to understand the
conditions of display and apprehension of the artwork that carries it.
A self-reflective work can manipulate different visual and textual modes of
communication in order to cause shifts in reading and viewing. It is able
to extend its critical engagement outwards and raise questions about its
classification and evaluation and about the audience’s expectations. It can
moreover situate artistic production in the public sphere, and by ques-
tioning and exposing the conditions of its own making, also question and
expose social beliefs, value systems and hierarchies that characterise other
aspects of social life.
By studying the performative gesture of image and text juxtapositions,
we can locate the conditions that create meaning as a social act and the
assumptions made in the process. We can also evaluate whether the critical
potential of an artwork can exceed its own spatio-temporal particularity
and the limits to which this can be maintained and make sense. This will
help specify the critical and often political dimensions of many conceptual
art practices beyond the locality of their first appearance. The initial point
of enquiry, then, is to locate the work and what is considered to be the work.
3.2 Speech Act Theory

John Austin (1962a [1955]) proposed separating what is being said from
how it is being said. He turned his attention to particular utterances that
do not seem to describe, assert, express etc. but rather to do. He called
these utterances “performatives”.
The performative utterance is not subject to its truthful state and there-
fore not verifiable in terms of truth or falsity. Rather, it is subject to its
effective and successful use. This use is governed by certain conditions that
Austin termed “felicity conditions”. These are that the utterance must be
part of an appropriate and conventional procedure; that it must be done
by appropriate and particular persons; that the act must be carried out cor-
rectly and completely; that the participants must have and the utterance
must evoke certain thoughts and feelings; and that all parties must have an
appropriate subsequent conduct. Not observing the first three conditions
will not achieve the performative speech act and will cause it to “mis-
fire”. On the other hand, an error in the last two conditions regarding the
participants’ feelings and attitudes will achieve the act but insincerely.
Austin called this “abuse” or cheating (1962a [1955], 16–18). For
instance, if one says “I pick George”, “George” must be such a thing that
can be picked (i.e. an actual player), “picking” must be a legitimate action
(i.e. the procedure for choosing players in this game) and the conversation
participants must actually be playing something.
Austin began his enquiry by looking into particular uses of language
such as saying “I do” in a wedding or “I hereby name this ship” in a
launching ceremony—cases, in other words, of highly ritualised language
use. Notwithstanding, he was not able to provide a definite description
for the performative. As he explained, in the majority of cases—or per-
haps in all cases—utterances could be restated as performatives (1962a
[1955], 79–80). For this reason, Austin (1962b) reconsidered his clas-
sification of utterances in constatives (that describe, assert etc.) and
performatives (that depend on felicity conditions rather than being a
matter of truth or falsity); and approached the utterance as an act that
is simultaneously realised at the level of locution (the formal meaning
of words), illocution (the act of saying) and perlocution (the overall
effect). Accordingly, he suggested a more general classification of utter-
ances in terms of forces or acts along three axes: the locutionary act,
the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary act. The first refers to the
performance of an act of saying something by making sounds in a certain
way and with a certain sense and reference. The second refers to the
performance of an act in saying something by virtue of the conventional
associated force (a statement, a threat, a promise etc.). Finally, the per-
locutionary act refers to the performance of an act by saying something
or the bringing about of the effects of saying by uttering something
(Austin 1962a [1955], 99–100). Regarding the latter, Austin signalled
the notion of uptake: the understanding on behalf of the hearer of what
the speaker said. That is, that a stretch of words was meant as a question
independently of whether the hearer could or would reply. It is impor-
tant to note that these three acts constitute a methodological distinction
of the different aspects of approaching a speech act and are simultane-
ously performed. They do not correspond to distinct steps in the process
of communication nor are causally related.
Continuing with his typology, Austin identified five general classes
of performative verbs according to their illocutionary force. Verdicates
such as estimating, reclaiming and appraising have a force of judgement.
Exercitives such as appointing, ordering and warning have a force of power.
48 E. KALYVA
Commissives such as promising, declaring and announcing are underlined

by commitment and intention. Behabitives such as apologising, congratu-
lating and cursing are based on social behaviour and are characterised by
attitude. Finally, expositives (to reply, to argue, to postulate) can have
different forces such as clarification, argumentation and so forth (Austin
1962a [1955], 151–152).
Austin’s thesis that utterances depend on certain conditions which par-
ticipants must share in order to be understood fundamentally changed
the philosophy of language and linguistics. His classification and typol-
ogy have been extended, reapplied and contested. Polite speech was one
area of application (Lakoff 1977), while lying or pretending persistently
caused problems with classification (Austin 1961). Austin’s student John
Searle (1969, 1979) treated the felicity conditions that Austin specified as
constitutive of the various illocutionary forces; and moreover suggested
that performative utterances can be explained in terms of preparatory con-
ditions, which specify real-world prerequisites for each illocutionary act,
sincerity conditions, which have to do with the speaker, and propositional
content. The latter is particularly important because it relates language to
the world (Searle 1999). The idea of propositional content can also over-
come the problem of negative statements in relation to the speech act. For
example, to say “I am not saying anything” is not a logical paradox or a lie
but rather expresses a particular intention through words.1
For its critics, speech act theory could not offer a clear and consis-
tent taxonomy of language with finite categories that covered all cases.
In response, some worked towards the concept of a master speech act in
everyday speech (Fotion 1971) while others sought to examine how per-
formatives are embedded in semantic structure (Sadock 1974). Still, critics
continued to argue that an additional category such as “force” might not
be necessary since it is participation in specific social roles that achieves
things beyond language rather than their utterance (Cohen 1964). In the
end, perhaps the word “performative” has been broken down and given
too many things to do (Warnock 1973).
Despite these difficulties, the concept of speech acts and of the per-
formative utterance has been widely applied in the analysis of literature
and art. Whereas artistic creation has traditionally been considered to be
1
Malcolm Coulthard (1985) notes that whereas for Austin the illocutionary force was the
realisation of the speaker’s intention, Searle saw it as the product of the listener’s interpreta-
tion given certain usage conditions.
based on a contrast between poetic language and some other “neutral”

language, speech act theory offered new tools for examining the relation
between stylistics and linguistics. This was done by addressing the network
of circumstances that provide the context for language use and social con-
ventions. In reading a text, the reader participates in the abstraction of the
illocutionary force from its context, and assumes the felicity of hypotheti-
cal speech acts based on conditions that are shaped by the author, who is
often located in a privileged position, and inferred in a world of required
circumstances (Ohmann 1972; Hancher 1975; Felman 1983). Speech act
theory also drew attention to how context reproduces and affirms ideolo-
gies and accepted social norms as much as it shapes a community of readers
who evaluate appropriate communication. Considering the contemporary
novel and writing as a cultural practice, Mary Louise Pratt (1986) identi-
fies a confrontation between the reader and the text as a kind of literary
jeopardy that reflects the social conditions of the time of the text’s produc-
tion as well as of the time of its reading. Thus, while language does not
exclusively create reality, it structures social relationships. In other words,
speech both constructs and guards the discursive binaries that determine
meaning. For Judith Butler (1997), the power of social hierarchies lies in
the very presupposition that makes performative gestures communicable.
In the visual arts, reconsiderations of the presumed neutral act of
interpretation became reinforced by the attention of speech act theory
to context and the community of users. In addition, speech act theory
allowed for the reconceptualisation of intention. In the study of lan-
guage, understanding intention is important because it divides the side
of the speaker from the side of the hearer. This means that an utterance
can have meaning even if the interlocutors do not agree or do not com-
ply (to recall Austin’s notion of uptake), and that communication is not
autonomous but mediated (to recall Peirce and Barthes). Regarding art,
however, addressing intentionality comes at odds with the universality
of the aesthetic as well as with the idea of the universal communicabil-
ity of feelings. Indeed, formalism in literary and art criticism had com-
pletely removed intention from the analysis of the work—to consider it
was described as “intentional fallacy” by the New Critics in the 1940s.
In conceptual art, exploring intentionality and the limits of consensus
returned as intellectual trouble for the formalist art critic as well as for
the modernist art viewer since it exposed the expectations, limitations
and demands placed on art.
50 E. KALYVA
To conclude, one of the main challenges for speech act theory derived
from the rising interest, in the 1970s and 1980s, in deconstructing textual
discourse (to which we will return in Chapter 5). In his communication with
Searle, Jacques Derrida (1988) argued that context cannot and should not
be exhaustively described—that its determination, in other words, cannot be
saturated. One of Derrida’s main objections was that speech act theory tends
to internalise contextual variability into the structure of speech. On the con-
trary, writing for Derrida (1974 [1967]) creates new structural possibilities
for the referent beyond speech or the signified idea. His famous thesis that
there is nothing outside the text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte, literally translating
“there is no outside-text”) means, contrary to the formalists, precisely this:
that everything becomes part of the text in the sense of the references and
associations that are involved in meaning-making even when not typed on the
page. (This is referred to as (inter)textuality: this typology reminds the reader
that there is no clear-cut distinction between textuality, referring to that which
lies inside a particular text, and intertextuality, referring to everything beyond
it; that the limits of the text, in other words, are not well defined.) For Derrida,
writing expands the space of communication as the sign ruptures its context
and breaks away from it by virtue of being readable beyond the moment of
its inscription and the intention of its author-scriptor who abandons it to its
essential drift. One such drift is created by Derrida’s writing style which is
purposely set against Searle’s analytic tenor in an effort to tease out the limits
of “serious talk” that Derrida understands to be the focus of speech act theory.
The effort to demarcate proper, serious or ordinary uses from other figu-
rative or poetic uses of language is as persistent, and as tentative, as is sepa-
rating the art-object from the real thing that it is. If there is a convergence
between analytic philosophy and deconstruction, it is that there is no such
thing as a “neutral” thing (a word, an object) before its application. It may
be that the sign, with its uncontrollable prehistory and mysterious future,
leaks through the lines and constantly threatens to explode the text. But if
for J. Hillis Miller literature is a returning ghost that haunts Austin (2001,
18), attention also keeps returning to the concept of the performative in the
process of the systematisation of language use precisely because it acknowl-
edges the conditions of communication even when this is not achieved.
As for the sign’s indeterminacy, this cannot be threatened by a theory
of speech acts, in the same way that the possibility to achieve particular
meaning poses no threat to the polysemy of language. In fact, what allows
for the particularity of meaning is a sign’s dialectical relation to generality.
Rather than holding something as having an infallible relation to some
universal truth, this preserves the capacity of words to mean different things
in different contexts depending on use. How these different meanings are

taken from one disciplinary context and inserted into another, used in ritu-
als or voice dominant ideologies is precisely the point of enquiry. To put
it differently, there must be at least one known meaning and one known
context (and it is one of the aims of the present analysis to demonstrate
this) in order to claim that words break away from it or that an act is able
to displace meaning. At a more critical level, the analysis of a work’s perfor-
mative gesture is concerned with how meaning is prioritised and habitually
and ideologically conditioned in instances when the free-floating signs are
both anchored in meaning and erupt from it. It is this inevitability that
many conceptual art practices sought to bring to light.
3.3 Staging the Act: Keith Arnatt’s Art

as an Act of Retraction (1971)
Conceptual art in Britain was officially marked in 1972 by two exhibitions:

the Tate’s Seven Exhibitions (24 February–23 March) and the Hayward
Gallery’s The New Art (17 August–24 September). The Tate exhibition
was organised by Michael Compton, keeper of Exhibitions and Education,
and presented works by Arnatt, Michael Craig-Martin, Hamish Fulton,
Bob Law, Bruce McLean, David Tremlett and Joseph Beuys. It was one
of the first exhibitions to be organised and managed exclusively by the
Tate, which was previously run by the Arts Council of Great Britain until
the opening of the Hayward Gallery in 1968 (see Chapter 4). There were
overlaps between the two exhibitions. The organiser of the latter, Anne
Seymour, was assistant keeper at the Tate; some artists participated in both
shows and installation views from the Tate including Arnatt’s Art and
Egocentricity—A Perlocutionary Act? (1971) were reproduced in the exhi-
bition catalogue of The New Art. For Nicolas Serota (2009), the current
Tate director, Seven Exhibitions helped create a homogenous narrative for
the artistic production of the time.
The exhibition included photographs, films and tape recorders as well as
Beuys’s public lecture on direct democracy. Displaying mixed media work
was something new for the Tate but not for other, commercial, London gal-
leries such as the Rowan, Lisson and Nigel Greenwood Galleries. A second
novelty by the Tate’s standards was the exhibition catalogue, which con-
sisted of a folder with seven posters, one for each participating artist. Its
introduction argued that the artworks on display advanced a long-standing
52 E. KALYVA
enquiry into the role and definition of art. The exhibition received a mixed
response. It was criticised for the arguably “questionable quality” of the
exhibits and their relation to art, and a letter to the Secretary of the Friends
of the Tate Gallery even characterised them as “an abysmal collection of
rubbish” (Tate Archives TG 92/242/1). Some reviews tried to locate the
show by referring to Duchamp and “a territory [of artistic production]
loosely called ‘conceptual art’” (Gosling 1972), or to “‘happenings’ of a
fun-fair nature which might appeal to the young” (London Weekly Diary
1972). Others welcomed the endeavour of the Tate, a public gallery, to
display such works even though they found the exhibition rather conserva-
tive in comparison to what one would see at the Camden Arts Centre or at
Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum (Brett 1972; Russell 1972).
The juxtaposition of images and texts was one strategy that conceptual
artists used to cause shifts in the habitual modes of viewing and reading
and by this upset the ways in which art was habitually perceived. By stag-
ing a contradiction or tension between what one sees and what one reads,
such works sought to challenge the traditional understanding of the artist
as the creator, the spectator as a passive recipient and the art institution
as a neutral exhibition space. The conceptual activities of Arnatt in the
late 1960s and early 1970s included combining words with photographs
and objects, pasting propositions on gallery walls, and circulating texts
in exhibition catalogues that questioned the intentionality, apprehension
and category of art. Perhaps one of Arnatt’s most famous works from
this period is Trouser-Word Piece (1972). It combines of a quote from
Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (1962) with a photograph of Arnatt hold-
ing a sandwich board which read “I’m a real artist”. This image has been
widely reproduced and became one of the reference points of conceptual
art in Britain and its legacy. (It will be discussed in the next chapter.)
As part of Seven Exhibitions, Arnatt presented Art as an Act of Retraction
(1971). It consists of a series of 11 black and white photographs, measur-
ing 50.8 × 35.4 cm taken against a white background. They depict a man,
framed from the knees up, placing a small piece of paper in his mouth. Each
photograph is numbered and each piece of paper in them reads a different
word. The numbers and words correspond to a list of numbered words on
a sheet of paper placed next to the photographs. The list reads, below the
work’s title, “eleven portraits of the artist about to eat his own words”.
There were some problems with Arnatt’s participation in the Tate exhibi-
tion. Art as an Act of Retraction was not listed in the exhibition catalogue
and his Self-Burial (1969) was listed as The Disappearance of the Artist even
though its title was correctly mentioned in the correspondence regarding

its loan. Due to recurring power failures, Arnatt’s An Exhibition of the
Duration of the Exhibition (1970), originally a digital countdown device
of the duration of the show in seconds previously shown at Idea Structures
(1970, Camden Arts Centre), was displayed as a numerical inscription on
the wall. Moreover, Arnatt had to apologise for his Tate Work (1972), a
series of photographic portraits of the gallery’s staff, because members of
the public had found it offensive, and explain his intention with this work
to show how the making of exhibitions requires a collective effort (Tate
Archives TG 92/242/1).
The reception of conceptual art has changed a lot since then. One way
to understand this is to observe the changing institutional status of works
from this period. Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction had been part of
the Tate Archives since 1972 until 2010 when it was moved to the Tate’s
main collection together with other photographic and text-based works by
Arnatt, such as Invisible Hole Revealed by the Shadow of the Artist (1968),
Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self (1969–72), Art as
an Act of Omission (1971), also shown at Seven Exhibitions, and I Have
Decided to Go to the Tate Gallery Next Friday (1971).
3.3.1 Photography and Intentionality
Many conceptual artists explored photography in the late 1960s facilitated
by technological advancements and financially and technically accessible
equipment. One use of the camera was as a documenting device employed
to test the phenomenological randomness of appearance. (A branch of
philosophy, phenomenology is concerned with how the world and con-
sciousness are experienced from the first-person point of view.) This
interest followed a tradition of functional use of photography and pho-
tojournalism in the line of Walker Evans and Ed Ruscha, and is common
in the work of American conceptual artists such as Robert Smithson and
Douglas Huebler (Wall 1995). Huebler (1969) described the camera as a
“dumb” copying device, only serving to document the phenomena that
appear before it. Consider his Duration Piece # 4 executed in New York
on 5 February 1969. According to the work’s statement-description, it
consists of ten photographs taken at mathematically d
etermined time
intervals starting from an arbitrary moment and capturing whatever
“appearance” existed closest to the camera, itself located in an arbitrary
position (original quotation marks).
54 E. KALYVA
From a different perspective, photography was used as a means to

explore three-dimensional representations and to condition, or stabilise,
the situation of their display and apprehension. This tendency is particu-
larly evident in the work of artists who studied Advanced Sculpture at St
Martin’s College, London under Anthony Caro. A key figure in the devel-
opment of the principles of abstraction, Caro taught at St Martin’s between
1952 and 1979, a college with which many conceptual artists were asso-
ciated. Bruce McLean, David Bainbridge, Barry Flanagan, John Hilliard,
Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George and Roelof Louw all
studied there; Flanagan and John Latham were members of staff and Louw
later became director of the Advanced Sculpture course. Charles Harrison,
an art critic, editor of Studio International and member of Art & Language,
also taught briefly at St Martin’s and Harold Hurrell, another member of
Art & Language, worked there as a technician in 1963.2 St Martin’s pro-
moted improvisation with different materials and the “open-endness” of
construction. Under this framework, Harrison (1984) explains, it was pos-
sible to conceive the sculpture of David Smith as compatible in practice with
the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.
A second reason for the shifts in artistic production in the UK were
the changes in higher art education. Throughout the 1960s, these
changes aimed at the professionalisation of different strands of art edu-
cation in contrast to skills-based vocational training and the separa-
tion of theory from practice (we will return to this in Chapter 5). At
St Martin’s, the Advanced Sculpture course remained vocational and art-
ists could take evening classes by Caro and pursue sculpture to its own
end (Harrison 1969a). In this context, photographs were used to explore
the object, its staging and the situations that it created rather than to
simply record that event. Here, staging refers not only to the activity of
viewing but also to the activity of making, and photographic works from
this period often aimed to position the spectator in the act of observa-
tion while at the same time challenging the validity of that act (Fig. 3.1).
2
The other central site of conceptual art in the UK was the Coventry College of Art, which
was absorbed by the Lanchester Polytechnic in 1970, where Art & Language were based.
Michael Baldwin was a student there (1965–67) and later a teaching assistant, as was David
Bainbridge. Terry Atkinson worked at Coventry as lecturer for the period 1967–73. For his
part, Arnatt studied at the Oxford School of Art (1951–55) and the Royal Academy Schools
(1956–58). Victor Burgin studied at the Royal College of Art (1962–65), and David
Tremlett at the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts (1963–66) and the Royal College of
Art (1966–69).
Fig. 3.1 John Hilliard, 765 Paper Balls (1) (1969). Black and white photograph
on board. 122 × 122 cm (© John Hilliard)
Consider Hilliard’s 765 Paper Balls (1969). The work was carried out
exclusively for photographic purposes—the photographic prints were
sold for £25—as part of the artist’s exploration into whether a photo-
graph could become a sculpture (Hilliard 1971). The depicted paper
balls, suspended by invisible strings in an empty room next to a window,
could resemble a still from a staged snowing scene; but they also dupli-
cate the ability of the photographic medium to suspend the act of viewing
in time and space. In this sense, the work offers the physical reminder,
and remainder, of an ever-absent presence. In addition, because the balls
were made of recycled newspaper, the work links the inside to the out-
side, but also the private to the public. Other works by Hilliard such as
Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 Apertures, 10 Speeds, 2 Mirrors)
(1971) and 10 Runs past a Fixed Point (3) 1/500 to 1 Second (1971) self-
reflectively document their own making by photographing the camera in
the process of capturing images.
Arnatt used photographs in order to stage an act or a gesture and to pose
particular problems to the viewer. One concerned the presence of the artist
56 E. KALYVA
and removing or retracting it from view. His Invisible Hole Revealed by the
Shadow of the Artist (1968) and Self-Burial (1969) enact the disappear-
ance of the artist’s body. They negotiate the discrepancy between imagined
and actual situation, as well as the institutional and conventional settings of
experience (Arnatt 1989). In such explorations and experimentations, the
photographic frame is used as a frame of reference—a frame of vision and of
action that happens not only on the photographic plane but also, in the case
of serial works, that takes place between the shots. Rather than the photo-
graph standing witness to an external activity that it formally documents
as a fixed and stable outcome of mechanical exposure, such works caused
attention to move beyond the frame and between the gaps, to that which the
camera is unable to capture. Attention thus turns to how the act of taking
pictures is framed: how a picture is taken by one person and how it is looked
at by others; and how, against a tradition of demonstrating how the object
stands in-itself, the act of framing is not neutral. Returning to Self-Burial, a
sequence of televised photographic shots,3 Arnatt (1997) explains in retro-
spect that the idea behind the work originated from a critic’s comment on
the dematerialisation of art that he wanted to address in relation to being an
artist; specifically, he wanted to test whether it would follow that the artist
would disappear if the art-object disappeared.
A second, related interest in Arnatt’s work from this period was per-
formativity, intentionality and propositional content, which he explored
by the use of language. At the Tate’s Seven Exhibitions, his Art and
Egocentricity—A Perlocutionary Act? (1971) consisted of the proposition
“Keith Arnatt is an artist” pasted on the wall and a catalogue text that dis-
cussed the ideas of Grice and Searle about intentionality and speech acts. An
installation view of the work was circulated as a postcard. Arnatt explored
the idea of bringing about a certain effect by way of words in his Is it Possible
for Me to Do Nothing as my Contribution to this Exhibition? (1970) (Idea
Structures, Camden Arts Centre) and Did I Intend to Do This Work? (1971)
(Wall Show, Lisson Gallery). In 1972, Arnatt submitted a proposal for the
City Sculpture Project which commissioned sculptures in eight provisional
3
Self-Burial (1969) was originally broadcast by Gerald Schum as part of a series of artist
screenings for the Westdeutsches Fernsehen between 11 and 18 October 1969. It was pre-
sented at timed intervals which interrupted the flow of other running programmes. The
screenings schedule was advertised. Parts of Arnatt’s work were sequentially shown every day
at 20:15 and 21:15. After all nine shots that comprised the piece were shown individually,
they all appeared together with a note regarding the work. A copy of the programme can be
found at the Tate Archives TGA 786/5/2/6.
cities to be displayed for 6 months. He suggested displaying two billboards

reading “Keith Arnatt is an artist” and “Keith Arnatt is not an artist”
respectively. As the proposal explained:
Two statements may be related in such a way that if one of them is true, the
other must be false: and if one of them is false, the other must be true. We
may not know which is the true one and which is the false one, but we can
be certain that one of them is true and the other is false. Such statements are
called “contradictories” of each other; the relation between them is called
“contradiction”*. *“Logic”, Wesley C. Salmon-Prentice-hall-1963. (Tate
Archives TGA 7226)
The proposal was rejected.
3.3.2
Locating Arnatt’s Performative Gesture
Let us closely examine Art as an Act of Retraction.4 Formally, the work
consists of 11 well-staged photographs where someone is seen biting on a
piece of paper, each inscribed with a different word. The individual pho-
tographic prints are numbered. Next to the photographs is a text with the
work’s title and a list of 11 numbered words that read “eleven portraits of
the artist about to eat his own words”. But what exactly does this work do?
Speech act theory proposes a framework for understanding commu-
nication as an act based on certain conditions. To understand Arnatt’s
work and how it communicates we must first locate these conditions,
and then detect the techniques that the work uses in order to manipu-
late the assumptions made in the acts of viewing and reading. To begin
with the work’s visual part, this is arranged horizontally and if one
begins viewing the piece from left to right, which is a common read-
ing movement, one first sees the series of images before arriving at the
text. The proximity of the images and the text in space and the condi-
tion of their display in a gallery where visual art is usually exhibited next
to its title panel or explanatory note, incite a familiar reading of the text
as describing the images and corroborating their story. Moreover, the
list of words that appear next to these images (“eleven portraits of the
artist about to eat his own words”) can be easily understood, at this point,
4
Image details of this work can be viewed at http://www.tate.org.uk/about/press-office/
press-releases/conceptual-art-britain-1964-1979-0.
58 E. KALYVA
as forming a meaningful whole. Equally, the images become part of a

series that visually displays the same narrative as the text next to it.
However, the presence of the text also creates tension: a temporal ten-
sion between what is read and what is viewed which contests the assump-
tion of collaboration between the work’s visual and textual parts (as,
for example, in the case of illustration). The word “about”, a temporal
indicator referring to an imminent event that has not yet taken place, is
contradicted by the action depicted in the photographs where the event
of eating has already commenced. This temporal distortion affects the
narrative which is produced when one tries to visually and conceptually
unify the work. Temporal tension creates a pseudo-time, a different time
in narrative temporality that splits depicted time from the time of viewing.
Narrative discourse can be understood in terms of story (content), narra-
tive (text) and narrating (narration or narrative action), as well as in terms
of tense (temporal distortions), aspect (the way the events are presented)
and mood (the type of discourse used) (Genette 1980). In Arnatt’s work,
the temporal tension between the images and the text transforms the pho-
tographs into a series of individual snapshots of a repeated action that
appears stuck in time and space. Put differently, the spatial and temporal
progression that the sequential gallery display of these photographs and
words may initially suggest now seems to exist in a frozen state of becom-
ing, forced to linger between the frames of each photographic print and
each enumerated word. As a result, the physical gaps in the reading and
viewing of the work suspend and diverge the time of reading and viewing,
as well as the time of the production and apprehension of the work.
At this point, in order to prevent the work from collapsing conceptually,
one can relate words and images by a causal link: that the words describe
a pending action that is subsequently depicted in the photographs. This
entails accepting that one cannot tell which action comes before and after
simply by looking at the work’s “portraits” without the anticipation pro-
duced by the text—that is, without following its enumerated word order.
This order not only forms a legible sentence, but also places the photo-
graphs in narrative sequence. A different choice of words, for example
with the verb in the past or present continuous tense, could have created a
descriptive alliance between verbal report and visual depiction. However,
as the case stands, it seems that these few words next to these images are
doing something beyond the obvious—something that is brought for-
ward and conditioned by the format of their gallery display.
The temporal and conceptual tension that the juxtaposition of the visual
and the textual aspects of the work creates could be alleviated by the famil-
iarity of the act of eating, which the images depict. This is based on two
assumptions. First, in order for the textual narrative to be truthful and to
make sense (“eleven portraits of the artist about to eat his own words”),
one assumes that the man depicted in the images is indeed the artist.
Second, one assumes that what is barely visible on the little pieces of paper
depicted in the images and what also stands next to these images constitute
the artist’s own words, rather than being the curator’s or the critic’s in a
declaration of the type “and here we see the artist eating his own words”.
However, one stumbles on the idea of eating paper—a schoolroom feat
as the press described it (Gosling 1972). But mischief is not the problem.
Rather, the work produces a distance between its subject matter and the
viewer. At one level, a distancing effect is created by staging the photo-
graphs as portrait snapshots of an allochronic activity, on the one hand;
and by formulating the words in an indirect, third person voice, on the
other, which the artist is then about to eat in an ever-lingering present.
Thus, while it appears that a performance of eating little pieces of paper
is laid out for the onlooker, the presence of the artist is suspended. As
such, the work becomes a reminder not only of a past and absent act
that is photographically captured, but also of a past and absent activity
from which the spectator is excluded but nonetheless invited to witness.
At another level, the work’s title creates additional tension by announcing
the presence of absence. The words “art as an act of retraction” herald the
pending of a definite action that is referred to by the text and depicted
in the images. Ironically however, this action will invalidate those words
and images (the means to convey its arrival) once the artist acts out the
promise to eat his own words—a pun on retracting what one said, having
regretted saying it, now made literal. But it is also more than that.
Recalling Austin’s taxonomy, the sentences “eleven portraits of the
artist about to eat his own words” and “art as an act of retraction” are,
strictly speaking, constative utterances that declare or describe. Yet to
speak in strict terms requires projecting an utterance into a neutral condi-
tion, for example away from the bothersome influence of images and the
context of the gallery display. Which is to say, there is no taxonomy of
how things (words, images) behave out of context and in isolation—not
even for those highly ritualised cases such as getting married or naming a
ship that were Austin’s starting point. Rather, things are always, already in
60 E. KALYVA
context. These three techniques—of manipulating typical gallery display,

of creating temporal and conceptual tension between image and text, and
of creating a distance between the artist and the viewer—cause a double
transformation. At the level of the relation between image and text, they
transform any initial, collaborative relation between photographs and
words into a progressively antagonistic interaction. At the level of the rela-
tion between artist and viewer, they undermine the authority of the artist
and the claims of his work.
The performative gesture in Arnatt’s work, produced by the manipula-
tion of visual and textual registers as described above, can be located in
this: if one believes the artist’s words, and in order for the work to abide to
its textual promise and successfully sustain what is enacted visually, words
must be provided and continue being eaten. Yet, apart from the words
currently depicted in the images as being eaten, the immediate source
of the artist’s own words is located in the text next to them—a text that
now appears as a tiresome command lingering by his side and put perma-
nently on gallery display. As a result, the process of understanding what
the work’s textual parts, including its title, might be doing in collabora-
tion with its visual parts causes the work to turn on itself.
Image and text can no longer support each other descriptively and
communicate with the viewer in a straightforward, effortless manner. On
the contrary, not only is the producer turned against his own work, but
the images and the words of the work are forced to feed off each other
and to feed each other’s predicament. But until when? Will it be possible
that the artist gets tired of this self-consumption, stops this foolishness,
eats his words and goes home? And if so, will this cause the images and the
text, the work of art, to expire? If the artist complies with the demands of
art and carries out the work’s pre-announced task, its textual part will be
consumed and its photographs emptied of significance since there will be
no further need to witness an act that has already expired.
In terms of Austin’s felicity conditions for the success of the performa-
tive act, the act in Arnatt’s case is not carried out completely nor is there
an appropriate subsequent conduct. This means that the performative act
both misfires and there is abuse, or cheating, involved. Indeed, what was
offered up for display is now threatened with removal. To be exact, the
initial invitation that the images extend to the viewer (that is, to witness a
staged event) is now transformed into a threat of retraction once viewed
in juxtaposition with the words that surround them. But this threat of
retraction is not only directed towards the artist in relation to his work or
towards the work in relation to its constituent parts. It is critically directed

towards the spectator, threatening that the work of art will be removed
from view.
The juxtaposition of words and images in Arnatt’s work does something
more than bringing together two different modes of communication. It is
a performative juxtaposition that transforms the illocutionary force that the
images and words might have had prior to their particular combination. (The
illocutionary force refers to the performance of an act in saying something by
virtue of a conventional associated force such as a statement or a promise.)
By enacting this transformation on its own body, the work seeks to transform
the assumptions, attitudes and habits of its viewing audience and institutional
setting. Rather than conveying the intention of carrying out a simple act of
eating scribbled pieces of paper, the juxtaposition of image and text in Art
as an Act of Retraction implicates spectatorship and consumption. It equates
the natural act of eating with a habitual, neutralised way of viewing art in
a threatening context where the familiarity of the situation gives no solace
to the spectator. The work is unstable, inviting its own obliteration via self-
consumption while being captured in a sequence of snapshots that allow it to
live on display forever. The viewer is lured to the display of an act only to wit-
ness losing sight of it. It is an act of internal destruction that must be recorded
externally in order to survive, an act for which the viewer/reader is required
as an accomplice. At the same time, if the work is retracted or if it expires, the
spectator will be deprived of a gratifying spectacle and left without resolution.
Guy Debord notes on the spectacle:
The spectacle is […] designed to force people to equate goods with com-
modities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according
to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it
never ceases to include privation. […] The satisfaction that no longer comes
from using the commodities produced in abundance is now sought through
recognition of their value as commodities. (Debord 1970 [1967], §44 and
67; original emphasis)
Art as an Act of Retraction inverts the relation between subject/object at

multiple layers and transposes the threat of extinction, via eating, onto the
pleasure of consuming. In this transgression of the linear arrangements of
both images and words, the arche seems to be lost and the force of pres-
ervation demands that the artist keep on producing and that the spectator
keep on viewing. Permanence of exposure feeds the public’s viewing needs
for if there is nothing to see, our own actions can be rendered meaningless.
62 E. KALYVA
Moreover, once fixed on the gallery wall for public display, the event is
institutionally sanctioned: the artist is validated as an art producer, the
gallery as a site of the legitimation of art and the spectator as a consumer.
But Arnatt’s work denies any reward for viewing art as a spectacle. It is
able to formally support a performative gesture that draws to the surface
and upsets the contextual conditions of recognition and communication.
Trapped between curatorial stability and temporal and modular tension, the
artist resorts to eating his own words in his own work—that is, what one
has in front of her as the work: these words and these images of these words
being eaten. In the end, we cannot ignore how we have been tricked by
the work’s internal logic of censorship that we are now forced to recognise
as externally conditioned. Likewise, we cannot ignore how we are forced
to recognise that art exists in a voyeuristic capitalist society that is defined
by the cult(ure) of the expert—in this case, the gallery—which demands
that the artist and the viewer exist in an atemporal state of deprivation.
Yet this is not just another incident of self-censorship. Rather, it is censor-
ship caught in the act. By manipulating viewing and reading expectations,
Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction stages self-censorship not as a private
affair that needs to be removed from public view, but as the possibility of
critique caught between institutional validity and spectatorial resolution.
3.3.3 Retractions and Rules of Engagement

Retraction is not only found in this artwork by Arnatt. The absence of ref-
erence of Art as an Act of Retraction in the exhibition catalogue of Seven
Exhibitions could indicate some kind of institutional collaboration with the
will of the artist to obliterate his work. However, it would be considered
inappropriate for the artist to retract or refuse access to art both as a means
to cultivate taste and as a cultural commodity. In the historical context of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, many artists engaged in acts of hindering
or depriving the spectator. Withdrawals, removals, decaying works and
restrictions of access were employed to challenge prevalent considerations
of art as a neutral activity without social or political responsibility. This
is not to say that retraction is critical per se. It must be staged as a nega-
tive moment in the artwork’s engagement with institutional hierarchies
and social norms, while acknowledging how these hierarchies and norms
define both the artwork’s own condition and the channels of communica-
tion that it employs.
John Latham’s Still and Chew (1964) is well known in this context. As
the story goes, Latham borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg’s collected
essays Art and Culture (1961) from the library of St Martin’s College
where he was teaching at the time and, in an appropriately organised event
in collaboration with Barry Flanagan called Still and Chew, selected pages
from the book were torn out and chewed. The remains were subjected to
“fermentation” with acid and yeast and the end-product was placed in a
labelled tube and returned to the library once the book’s loan had expired.
The following day, Latham received a letter from the College terminating
his teaching agreement. This story is conveniently and convincingly retold in
Latham’s Art and Culture (1966–69), a suitcase with a text describing the
event, a copy of Greenberg’s book, little tubes, chemicals and Latham’s let-
ter of dismissal. Another series of events of ritualised destruction and perish-
able artworks was Latham’s Skoob Tower Ceremonies (1964–68, 1996–98).
Piles of books were burnt in public sites in London such as outside the Law
Courts and Senate House, while one “ceremony” took place at the rear
entrance of the British Museum and across the street from the University
of London Library which was hosting the symposium Destruction in Art
(1966) organised by Gustav Metzger. These acts can be read in several
ways, depending on the associations one makes. In their historical context,
one concern was the exploration of sculptural conventions. For Latham
(1968), the aim was to explore the possibility of an asculptural idea or a
reverse-order sculpture and to contradict the general notion, imposed by
the museum, that sculpture was definitive and aimed at permanence.
Another example of undoing are the performances of Ian Breakwell
UNWORD (1969) and UNSCULPT (1970). UNWORD was performed
in a room filled with paper sheets suspended from ceiling to floor and
covered with words beginning with the prefix “un-”. It was presented
at the Compendium Bookshop, London on 20 June 1969, the ICA on
17 October 1969, Swansea University on 30 January 1970 and Bristol’s
Arts Centre on 17 February 1970. During the performance, films were
projected and tape recorders played as Breakwell gradually tore the paper
sheets, revealing a woman in a straightjacket sitting at the rear of the room.
Progressively, the artist pinned the torn paper, which was sprayed with
black paint by John Hilliard, on the woman’s clothes and wrote the word
“UNWORD” on the wall (Tate Archives TGA 786/5/2/80; Breakwell
1969; UNWORD 2003 [1969]; Worsley 2006). Moving beyond the visu-
ality of words, this event enacts both the physical and the conceptual dis-
solution of a word’s meaning, which is marked (or, perhaps, unmarked)
by the theatrical gesture of adding the prefix un- and executing it. As such,
UNWORD questions the acts of naming and engendering, of undoing
and reclaiming (Figs. 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5).
64 E. KALYVA
Fig. 3.2 Ian Breakwell, UNWORD 2 (1969). Performance still. 17 October 1969,
ICA, London (© Ian Breakwell and Mike Leggett. The Estate of Ian Breakwell)
Fig. 3.3 Ian Breakwell, UNWORD 2 (1969). Performance still. 17 October 1969,
ICA, London (© Ian Breakwell and Mike Leggett. The Estate of Ian Breakwell)
Fig. 3.4 Ian Breakwell, UNWORD 2 (1969). Performance still. 17 October

1969, ICA, London (© Ian Breakwell and Mike Leggett. The Estate of Ian
Breakwell)
UNSCULPT, presented at London’s New Arts Laboratory between

28 February and 21 March 1970, opened with Hilliard’s invitation to the
public to buy three of his hardware sculptures. As these were not sold,
Breakwell and two assistants covered them with sheets of paper that bore
the word “UNSCULPT”. According to Breakwell and Hilliard (1970), this
act rendered the sculptures incomplete as exhibits since they could not be
seen. Subsequently, the artists began to demolish the covered works with a
sledgehammer and an axe while members of the audience joined them. It
seems that this activity complied with the works’ predicament that, in their
demise, they would become a non-sculpture or a sculpture undone. After
the debris had been removed by Breakwell, Hilliard begun to publicly cre-
ate a new work in the emptied gallery space. Over the following weeks, each
artist took down what the other had created and installed new work.
These activities transformed the gallery space into a studio or, more
precisely as Mike Leggett notes (UNSCULPT 2008 [1970]), into an
operational space. Moreover, in both UNWORD and UNSCULPT, the
66 E. KALYVA
Fig. 3.5 Ian Breakwell,

UNWORD 2 (1969).
Performance stills. 17
October 1969, ICA,
London (© Ian Breakwell
and Mike Leggett. The
Estate of Ian Breakwell)
camera became part of the performance (Breakwell 2004). It not only

followed the actions of the artists who occasionally moved out of the audi-
ence’s view, but the act of filming itself was recorded by a second cam-
era. This caused a doubling of the documentary function. While the one
who documents helps the event exceed its spatio-temporal constraints, he
or she also allows the transcending element of posthumousness to enter
the performance on stage. This doubling brings the performance and its
recording into dialogue and can critically negotiate the relation between
subject and object. As with Arnatt’s work, this strategy of staging and jux-
taposing upsets the predetermined functions of the artist and the specta-
tor, the critic and the curator, and the event and its afterlife.
The context of an artwork’s presentation is important. This is not only
because the act of communication takes place somewhere and therefore has
a corresponding spatio-temporal register, but also because that space and
time become integral to the meaning-making process through which the

viewer is exposed to the work. Artworks function within the social space in
which they are experienced but also within a discursive space that they cre-
ate in the process of communication. By examining the performative aspect
of art with reference to speech act theory we can understand the contextual
function of artworks and locate the shifts in meaning that they create. This
method of analysis emphasises that communication is a shared activity.
Independently of whether one refers to art or to interpersonal exchange,
this activity obeys rules and conventions which participants recognise and
observe. Artworks are actualised within certain communities and structured
by certain discourses, but this does not mean that they cannot challenge
and change them.
For Harrison, Arnatt’s works, and in particular his text-based ones,
made an original contribution to an urgent and defining concern of the
avant-garde artists in the 1970s:
[In a period when] the power of modernist theory to prescribe an object

character for painting and sculpture appeared to have been exhausted, what
was to be inserted into the vacant space that was left for art to occupy, and
by what means was the spectator/reader to be alerted to it? (2009, 7)
Art as an Act of Retraction creates and supports certain conceptual gaps

in its reading and viewing, which cannot be overcome by any descriptive
textual mode or familiarity of visual recognition. It constantly feeds the
self-censorship that it stages but not for the spectator to keep on con-
suming—a habit now rendered contradictory—but for the work to keep
on challenging the processes of naturalisation of its critical engagement
with its context. This process also affects the work’s reception. If we take
the work literally, the temporal tension that is created between the indi-
vidual narratives of its images and texts cannot be resolved by a simple
hierarchy that would place one before and over the other, as for instance
an illustration or caption. Rather, the assumptions made about the work
in order to prevent logical inconclusiveness and to secure some spectato-
rial pleasure only cause the work to turn against itself, as well as against its
institutional context and those bearing witness.
Returning to the politics of the performative, Butler asks: Who speaks
when convention speaks? If censorship is one way of control, could it
also be used to produce speech? (Butler 1997, 25 and 128). Art as an
Act of Retraction interrogates the authority of the institution to regulate
the relations between presence, absence, desire and censorship and how
68 E. KALYVA
these relations are actualised within the social space of art. While habitual
viewing and reading regimes are fuelled by a spectatorial demand for
presence, the work contradicts viewing and reading modalities and dis-
pels any expectations for a harmonious visual and textual synthesis. Yet
this is done at the cost of the work’s own discursive stability by publicly
exposing the conditions of producing and consuming art beyond the fear
of loss, theft or damage.
By performing the act of eating one’s words and of making one’s work
disappear, the subject is suspended forever: the artist as the subject of cre-
ation, the spectator as a viewing subject and art as the viewed subject mat-
ter. Still, even though full absence cannot be shown, it can be indicated in
a negative moment. In Arnatt’s case, the tension between what is depicted
and what is read can only be resolved self-reflectively by the enacted disap-
pearance of the artist’s words, of his own voice and presence. To be sure,
there is no turning back once the text, out of the artist’s mouth, has been
fully exposed by his side next to the frozen image of it being consumed.
The work’s performative gesture reveals how the experience and commu-
nication of the work (how and what it communicates) are conditioned, as
well as the agents involved in this process. However, this is not done at
the level of effect. Rather, the work critically engages the mechanisms that
create, enable and sustain such constructs. In the end, and confronted
with a polarised moral judgement of art between truth and entertainment,
Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction risks its own presence in order to
transform an institutional failure into a censored promise never made.
3.4 The Case of Documentation: Roelof Louw’s

Tape-Recorder Project (6) (1971)
While Arnatt’s artistic practice developed through an engagement with
the object and subject of photographic representation, Louw explored the
construction of three-dimensional situations and the experience of view-
ing. A student at St Martin’s (1961–65) and later director of its Advanced
Sculpture course, Louw’s work was guided by an enquiry into how sculp-
tural forms could be structurally articulated as a set of relations and ges-
tures in dialogue with the space that they occupied and the body.
Such interests in the possibilities of communication through physi-
cal involvement and time/event structured situations were explored in a
series of annual exhibitions at the Stockwell Depot (1968–79) organised

by former St Martin’s students; the site also functioned as a cooperative
studio. Works presented at Stockwell incorporated the element of change,
exposed the spatial and temporal limitations of experiencing sculpture as
an object of contemplation, and took possession of that space while seek-
ing to transform it (Richardson 1968; Seymour 1969). The idea of sculp-
ture as an object of contemplation was favoured by the New Generation of
British sculptors who followed Caro’s principles of abstraction and broke
away from the doctrine of truth towards materials and feelings as found in
the work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Louw participated in the first two Stockwell exhibitions and his Untitled
’68 (1968) was bought by the Tate in 1970 for £630 (Tate Archives TG
4/2/643/1). Discussing his work, Harrison explains Louw’s interest in
testing the limits of structural expansion without breaking congruity, and
in maintaining openness in sculptural situations where the experience of
the by-now active spectator is governed by contextual associations. As
Harrison argues, “Iron poles on a building site are one thing. Iron poles
placed around a hill in Hampstead are another” (1969b, 126).
For Louw (1968), of particular interest were the wider space of kinaes-
thetic experience and the temporal progression of sculptural forms in the
context of confronting situations which functioned in their own terms. In
this process, his works were photographically documented and circulated.
The Orange Pyramid Show (1967), prepared for the opening of the
London’s New Arts Laboratory, consisted of a 5′6″ square base and a 5′
high pyramid made of 5,800 oranges that the visitors were invited to take;
the work’s disassembly was documented in a series of photographs. At the
landmark conceptual art exhibition When Attitudes Become Form (1969,
Bern), Louw presented the photographic traces of 20 wedged-shaped
cast-iron blocks, weighing 110 pounds, that were distributed throughout
Park Lane, London at 180 foot intervals. The blocks were placed in a way
that from each unit the following one would be just perceptible yet still
conceived as part of a whole. With this spatially extended work, Louw
sought to establish a “state of affairs” between the environment, the spec-
tator and the making of the work (1969; original quotation marks). Louw
also contributed to Studio International’s July/August 1970 textual exhi-
bition with installation views from his work Location (1969) which was
shown at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art the previous year. For this
work, Louw had stretched a thick black rubber around the gallery walls; its
images for Studio International were accompanied by a short description.
70 E. KALYVA
These examples outline Louw’s interest in staging the experience and

temporality of three-dimensional space. They also illustrate his interest,
which was shared by other artists of that period, in exploring the relation-
ships between making, reflecting and documenting. Photography was used
as part of the work in order to stage an event and structure its experience,
and as a means to challenge the mediation of representation. Hilliard, as
we have previously seen, did this by recording the recording device. For his
part, Richard Long used photographs to spatially and temporally transpose
the object of his landscape sculptures and to interrogate the inside and the
outside of the gallery space as an institutional frame for art. It is said that,
while still a student, Caro refused to assess Long’s twig installation and its
companion piece at the top of Ben Nevis on the grounds that he could not
see the whole work (Harrison and Wood 1993). This fragmentation of the
work also meant fragmentation of experience. Its installation may share for-
mal elements with minimalism, for instance, where sculptures stood in the
space of their experience as the real objects that they were. However, such
new conceptual explorations emphatically diverged from the idea of the con-
tained and autonomous art-object. They sought to transgress the boundar-
ies of the gallery space, and often denied the viewer of not only a complete
experience but also complete evidence of their presence.
This is not to say that conceptual artists did not use photography for doc-
umentation and, for their part, curators progressively used d ocumentation
in lieu of the work. Given the international networks through which con-
ceptual art was shared and shown, this was also done because of budget
restrictions and logistics. However, elevating documentation to the status
of artwork—a tendency characteristic of contemporary retrospectives of
conceptual art and favoured by collectors—has little to do with the work,
and much more to do with the art market. Therefore, a qualifying distinc-
tion is required to differentiate between a symptomatic use of photography
that often obeys institutional demands for preservation and validation, and
its critical use as integral to the creative process. The same goes for texts and
whether they are integral to the creative process or simply display addenda
(explanatory notes, contextual information, retrospective reflections etc.).
With this in mind, the following discussion examines how documenta-
tion affects the performative gesture of works that have visual and textual
components. As a case study, it considers Louw’s Tape-Recorder Project (6)
(1971), an installation of tape recorders presented at London’s Whitechapel
Art Gallery (26 February–12 March 1971) and later at New York Cultural
Center’s exhibition The British Avant-Garde (19 May–29 August
1971) in documented form. By comparing the two exhibitions, we can
examine how well the work retains its performativity as it undergoes

contextual transposition and structural transformation. It also allows us
to critically reflect on museum policies and the function of the archive.
If, in Arnatt’s work, performing retraction reveals how communication is
discursively and institutionally conditioned, the condition of Louw’s work
enables us to trace and uncover the agents that participate in this process.
By considering the juxtapositions of images and texts in this case, we can
trace institutional discourse in the making.
3.4.1 Transforming Voices and Commands on Tape

As in the case of the photographic camera, conceptual artists explored tape
recorders as a new artistic tool and a means of experimentation. Ian Burn
and Mel Ramsden’s Soft Tape (1966–67) played the recording of a text
that discussed context, loudness and perception at a low and monotonous
level. Blurring the sound of individual words with indecipherable noise,
the work aimed to demonstrate the dependence of meaning and effect on
the physical position of the spectator and her attention (Burn and Ramsden
1980). Arnatt, interested in logical configurations and intentionality, pre-
sented Type-Token (1970) at the Tate’s Seven Exhibitions (1972)—an
installation comprised of a tape recorder on a plinth with the word “now”
pasted on the wall above it that emitted that word every 15 minutes.
At New York Cultural Center’s Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects
(1970), Christine Kozlov exhibited Tape Recorder (Erasure) (1970). The
work used a tape recorder that recorded all the audible sounds in the exhi-
bition room in a process of erasure and replacement every two minutes to
address the effects of the exhibiting environment.
For his part, Louw developed various tape recorder projects that involved
instructions and placement. For Lisson Gallery’s Wall Show (1970–71), he
presented Tape-Recorder (5) (1970) and Exercises (3) (1970). The latter
consisted of instructions for the public to stand in front of a wall for variable
durations and in different positions such as pushing the wall until exhausted,
while the former engaged with movement. This was further tested in ver-
sions (6) and (7), which staged more complex relations between intention
and declaration. In these works, Louw (1974) explains his interest in the
topographical features of the site, the relationships between actions and
objects, and the nature of spectatorial engagement. These were explored
through structural associations that qualify the space that they occupy. With
reference to the artistic context of their time, Louw’s tape recorder projects
72 E. KALYVA
can be understood as sculptural extensions that negotiate the terms of physi-

cal presence and absence. Yet they do so through structures that are neither
permanent nor exclusively material. Rather, they are configured in the act
through the physical displacement of the spectator, halfway between cre-
ation and completion, and command and communication. It is this pro-
cess that supports the enquiry into why structures need to be, and do get,
confirmed.
Prior to the opening of Tape-Recorder (6) at the Whitechapel Art
Gallery, a poster invited members of the public to participate in a
recording session where they were asked to follow a series of instruc-
tions and to report their completion by announcing given sentences
scripted by the artist. These utterances were recorded and played in
a loop for the duration of the exhibition—an installation of ten num-
bered tape recorders laid in two equal rows of even and odd numbers in
an otherwise empty room (Whitechapel Archives WAG/EXH/2/135).
The instructions were:
1. I have been standing here.

I have decided to walk to the position opposite.
2–9. I have walked to this position.
I will walk to the next position.
10. I have arrived at this position.
I intend to return to the previous position.
9–2. I have arrived at this position.
I intend to return to the next position.
1. I am in this situation.
I am going to complete another stage.
2–9. I have completed this stage.
I am going to complete another stage.
10. Again I am in this position.
I am going to return to the preceding stage.
9–2. I have moved to this stage.
I am going to return to the next preceding stage.
1. I have now completed this event.
I am going to repeat another sequence.
2–9. I have completed this part of the sequence.
I am proceeding to the next part of the sequence.
10. I have now completed the final sequence.
The numbers of the orders from the script that are to be executed
correspond to the numbered tape recorders. Starting from tape recorder
1, the participant announces her starting place and decision to walk to
the opposite position (2). Arriving at tape recorder 2, she confirms her
action and announces the intention to walk to the next position (3). This
zigzag movement of confirmation of action and declaration of intention
continues until tape recorder 10. From there, the participant retraces her
steps to all previous positions declaring and moving from tape recorder
to tape recorder. Upon completion, the participant-turned-performer has
moved down and up the room two-and-a-half times, ending at the bottom
(10). In the totality of the work, the same movements are executed across
the room with a different combination of declarations (place/position,
situation/stage, event/sequence). Recalling Austin’s classification of per-
formative utterances according to their illocutionary force (i.e. estimates,
orders, promises, apologies and arguments), the scripted utterances oper-
ate at different performative levels. They function as orders presented by
the artist to the participants at the recording session; as declarations and
estimates when announced by the participants during their execution; and
as reports of a past activity played in a loop for the gallery visitor.
But the work does not stop here. It aims to transform that gallery visitor
into an active participant. Because the utterances and actions are repeated in
a logical pattern, their sequence is predictable. This causes a further transfor-
mation of their illocutionary force. At a first level, the p attern of repetitive
action creates a sense of promise in the mind of the visitor. Realising that the
performer has moved up and down, stopping and recording at each posi-
tion, the visitor expects that, upon her own arrival at each position, the same
performance will dutifully take place. In that sense, announcing arrival and
intention becomes both a confirmation of accomplishment and a guarantee of
progression. Indeed, during the installation, the volume of the tape recorders
was kept deliberately low, forcing the visitor to move in order to verify the
contents of each utterance. By doing so, the visitor was prompted to retrace
the performer’s actions but also to enact them. At a second level, the orders
that were transformed into promises become declarations. This is so because,
as the visitor moves across the room, the announcements of the tape recorders
become her own declarations of duplicated actions. This spatial reenactment
creates a link across real bodies in space and time, and between the now of the
experience and a past activity. This past activity is not simply documented but
becomes actual since it is concurrently performed.
74 E. KALYVA
Louw’s Tape-Recorder Project seeks to transform the gallery space by

creating imaginary lines across space and time but also across different
agents. One review of the time (Baker 1972) argued that this could be
understood as a critique of modernism and of the individualised subjective
experience of art through private contemplation. Indeed, Louw’s work
shifts the mode of engagement between the object and its location and
between the maker and the receiver by presenting one structure (material)
but actualising another (interpersonal). We could even say that the work
has, partly, an executable form. This form is enabled and determined by
the relation between the one who gives the orders and the one who carries
them out but it does not remain internal to the work. Instead of preserv-
ing this hierarchy of voices or having the relation between the artist and
the viewer mediated by the participant from the recording session, the
work opens up the creative act. Through a series of declarations, reports
and promises, it invites the visitor to become a creative collaborator and
perform her own spatial and interpersonal connections.
Let us consider the contents of these declarations, reports and promises
more closely. Following Louw’s script, the participant begins in one place
and declares an already made decision to move to an “opposite” posi-
tion where, upon arrival, the participant declares the completion of the
act of walking and the intention to return to the previous and next posi-
tions. Then, the participant is in a situation from where he or she promises
the completion of another stage, reports its completion and promises to
return to all preceding stages. And finally, the participant announces the
completion of the event and the intention to repeat and complete another
sequence. This change in the mode of declaration from position to situa-
tion to sequence corresponds to the following layers:
1. Declaring a decision for displacement and for executing and report-

ing movement across positions.
2. Promising displacement and executing and reporting a situation that
is being carried out and has already been carried out, i.e. the situation
of the spatial process (1) of intending, executing and reporting.
3. Reporting displacement and executing and announcing the comple-
tion of the work as a spatio-temporal sequence of events consisting
of situations (2) that, in turn, consist of positions (1), which are
intended, carried out and reported.
The logical structure of these utterances facilitates the gallery visi-

tor who is prompted to follow them and take up action. At the same time,
because their type changes, the orders in making the work, the order of the
work itself and the mode of its communication fold in on themselves. But
they do not collapse. Spatial and temporal adjectives (“next”, “previous”,
“preceding”) support the structure of the work internally in terms of lay-
out but also externally as something that needs to be executed and verified.
This is both in terms of intention but also location, since each position that
one reaches has already been established for the spectator by the performer
and for the performer by duplicating the artist’s orders.
In its loop play-back, this sequence of utterances reconfigures the positions
of different agents in space and time, but also in their institutional setting within
which the work seeks to override the gaps between the author, the performer
and the viewer. By offering itself up to external validation, the combination of
utterance with movement in a staged event can upset any presumed supremacy
of origin or artistic dictation. This means that the “work” neither lingers in the
intention of the artist nor is it awakened in the eye of the beholder. Rather, it
is established in the space and time of its public realisation. By extension, this
reminds us that permanence of value can only be secured by repetition and
compliance. The work of art and the hierarchies that run through it are not
only found in the idea and its apprehension but they are constantly reproduced
and upheld by a community of consenting users.
3.4.2 The Document and the Archive

Louw’s Tape-Recorder Project (6) was presented in documented form at
The British Avant-Garde, an exhibition organised by Charles Harrison for
the New York Cultural Center (NYCC) in 1971. The NYCC was a short-
lived endeavour. At a prestigious location at Central Park’s south-west cor-
ner, what used to be the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art was
renamed and passed under the administration of the Farleigh Dickinson
University in 1969. The centre ran under a five year plan with Donald
Karshan as its first director, who had a keen interest in showing interna-
tional art. Its first exhibitions included Conceptual Art and Conceptual
Aspects (1970), The Swiss Avant-Garde (1971) and The British Avant-
Garde (1971)—the last two were part of an envisaged International
Avant-Garde series.
According to its press release, The British Avant-Garde was a multi-
media survey of avant-garde activities that, while being diverse, articulated
a universal language. In his catalogue essay, Karshan (1971) highlighted
the benefits of a contemporary arts centre that, unlike established museums
that invested in acquisitions, could host a variety of exhibitions including
76 E. KALYVA
those by international artists. For his part, Harrison (1971) underscored the
transatlantic alliance of formalist/modernist American painting and British
sculpture that helped suppress any discussion outside the scope of formalist
criteria. Moving contrary to this tradition, Harrison continues, conceptual
artworks should not be viewed with expectations of stable material and for-
mal constituents but as activities that try and test the accuracy of their con-
ditions. Harrison, a leading figure in advancing a critique of the American
modernist art discourse and instrumental in the production and circulation
of critically engaged conceptual art, had asked for a reconsideration of the
exhibition’s title. In a letter to Karshan (8 January 1971; Tate Archives
TGA 839/1/5/1), he argued that the title sounded “a bit like Swinging
London in a howler hat” and that the concept of the avant-garde was rather
dated; instead he proposed considering a title along the lines of New Art
from England. This did not seem to fit with Karshan’s vision for the centre
or his promotion of the exhibition. Harrison also arranged for issue 933
(May 1971) of Studio International, where he was editor at the time, to
function as the exhibition’s catalogue.
Works on show included David Tremlett’s notational score Tap Piece
(1970), Gilbert & George’s To be with Art is All we Ask (1970) and Long’s
Walking Sculpture (n.d.). In parallel, the centre held screenings of films
including Sue Arrowsmith’s Street Walk (1971) and Barry Flanagan’s Hole
in the Sea (1969). Text-based works such as Art & Language’s (Atkinson
and Baldwin) Air-Conditioning Show/Air Show/Frameworks 1966–7
(1966–67) and Theories of Ethics (1971) were pasted on the walls and were
also available for sale in book form. In retrospect, Harrison (1984) notes
that the show looked, and was, incoherent. As for the press, reviews com-
plained that the exhibition was dull, empty and inexpressive, claiming that
there was not a single work “that fired the imagination or produced even
the slightest visual or intellectual excitement” (Gruen 1971). Equally, its
long texts (viz. Art & Language’s) were deemed so tedious that they could
even make a fire alarm “suddenly bristle with interest” (Chapin 1971).
Louw suggested a new Tape-Recorder version that gave more weight to
spatial arrangement, participation and movement variation. However, due
to various organisational problems and miscommunication, Script (7) was
not realised.5 In an undated note, Harrison suggested that Louw prepared
5
In a telegram to Harrison (20 April 1971), Karshan refused to take responsibility for not
providing the required equipment (BAG Archives). This was not the only difficulty that the
exhibition was presented with. Gilbert & George’s To be with Art is All we Ask (1970), on
loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was prematurely removed and returned
a full sheet of documentation of the project with photographs, text and

so on in case the installation could not be set up (BAG Archives). Indeed,
Louw’s participation consisted of displaying two sets of blown-up Kodak
contact strips with shots of Tape-Recorder Project (6) from the Whitechapel
installation. In total, there were 48 images on the wall next to an explana-
tory note. In the format of a typical gallery explanatory note, this text
was based on the original Whitechapel script but also included an opening
paragraph, which described the accompanying images and their relation to
the text. As we will see, this text has a different function in relation to the
images. It still does something more than describing, but now its perfor-
mative function is dictated by an institutional hierarchy of voices.
Documentation not only transforms the work’s material support, mode
of communication and experience. One can read the script and still under-
stand the internal logic of the work and the conditions of its envisaged
performative act. Indeed, the script was sent to galleries and critics to out-
line the project and is the basis of the present analysis. But the act of docu-
mentation is not neutral. Michel Foucault (1972 [1969]) discusses the
systematisation of information as part of a certain discourse and explains
how the making of documents lends speech to those traces that are often
not verbal or that say in silence something other than what they actu-
ally say. When speaking about the “document”, one needs to make clear
to what one refers. While different conceptual art practices incorporated
photographs and texts, the documents produced for Tape-Recorder Project
(6) have a particular discursive function.
At a first level, documentation creates new objects (the Kodak con-
tact sheets, the script-as-explanation) that stand as evidence of a past event.
Whereas before there was a preparatory script and a room filled with tape
recorders, as well as other people’s sounds and bodies, the text now takes
precedence and becomes descriptive of the act in the aftermath. This creates
a causal dependence between the text and the images, and reverses the tem-
poral order of the making of the work. At a second level, the tape recorder
installation sought to reinsert fluidity across different modes of communica-
tion (declaration, report, promise). It relied on the collaboration of the spec-
tator in order to dissolve the barriers between artist and spectator, producer
and consumer, or to at least change their status as agents involved in the
to the MoMA (Karshan, letter to Harrison, 10 June 1971); a fuse and a bulb from David
Bainbridge’s installation accompanying Lecher System (1970) were burnt out (Karshan, letter
to Harrison, 10 June 1971); and an ingot from Harold Hurrell’s Ingot (1970) was stolen
(Karshan, letter to Hurrell, 24 June 1971) (Tate Archives TGA 839/1/5/1).
78 E. KALYVA
making and experience of art. On the contrary, documentation interrupts

the work’s performative act, leaving it unable to negotiate the permanence
of value through reenactment and collaboration, or the conditions of its gal-
lery display. By displaying a finite text next to consequent photographs of
some congealed end-product, Tape-Recorder Project is reduced to a binary of
photographic evidence of what could have taken place in an ever-absent and
inaccessible place. As a result, its documented form reinstates the spectator
and the ever-lingering artistic intention. Most importantly, it reinstates the
voice of authority. Crucially in this case however, this voice is not the artist’s
but the institution’s that now purports to have the exclusive power of insight
to a past activity.
Daniel Buren (1975) explains how the museum is a site where the
dominant ideology demands that a work be immortal and therefore inde-
structible by definition. This means that it not only commands the work’s
display but also its afterlife. Given adequate ideological and discursive con-
structs, documentation manipulates viewing and standardises a regime for
identifying what there is to be seen, as well as how that is to be understood.
It transforms what is considered to be the work into a stable and quantifi-
able entity and situates it as part of a certain history. The historiographical
discourse involves a process of continuously rewriting and relocating the
work. This process determines those essential qualities of the work that its
documentation will, in turn, profess to preserve. As such, documentation
both enriches institutional collections and enacts the discursive power of
the institution to own and transpose the artist’s command, and to preserve
and qualify the work of art.
As part of its institutional critique, conceptual art challenged the
long-held conception that the object of art is impervious to discourse.
It sought to demonstrate how interpretation is not neutral but invested,
how conventions and norms guide recognition and how such hierarchies
are reproduced with the audience as an accomplice. Trouble begins when
inconsistent descriptions of events fit equally well into different narrative
networks (Hurst 1981). The document shifts the referent in time and
space; when the document also becomes part of an archive, it forces two
other types of dislocation on the work. First, the work is relocated within
an archival order that becomes its new context, and which structures how
historical distance and relevance are perceived through and mediated by
the archive’s textuality (Huyssen 1993). At the same time, this reconfigu-
ration of the work’s spatio-temporal proximity as well as its reclassifica-
tion and reevaluation become a means through which the institutional
agent of that archive—in this case, the museum—demonstrates its own
value and authority in safeguarding historical continuity and heritage. It is

a closed system, in other words, of accumulation, classification and valida-
tion not only of contents but also of the process of (self-)preservation itself.
The past, towards which documentation points, must remain inacces-
sible if it is for the archive to offer a voyeuristic glimpse of what is oth-
erwise lost or beyond reach. At the same time, the archive regulates its
self-vindicating function as a point of access to such a past by treating the
information it provides as an intellectual commodity. For some, digital
technologies allow for new and varying genealogies and organisational and
access principles (Foster 1996). Multiple as these may be, it is discourse
that legitimises narratives. Through the construction of archives, the his-
toriographical discourse rearranges who is speaking through an order of
events that are structurally, but not necessarily causally, correlated. Most
importantly, it rearranges who commands the relation between occur-
rence and narration or of what Nelson Goodman (1980) calls the telling
and the told. The archive at once validates its objects and mystifies its own
processes by which it creates a corpus of documents based on selection,
exclusion and specification—a corpus that is subject to a series of restric-
tions, registration procedures and access permissions.
Displaying Louw’s tape recorder project as a document accompanied by
archival snapshots transforms the work into a stable visual arrangement of
depleted orders, and suppresses its interactive and interpersonal character.
Beginning and end, execution notes and forensic documentation, are locked
in an archival, causal relationship. Meanwhile, “the work” is permanently
displaced. Yet once one realises what the work could have been but is not, it
can only fail as an attempt of engagement. Curiously, the title given to the
work in the exhibition catalogue was “An Aesthetic of Engagement”. As the
local press complained:
The Londoner Roelof Louw seems to be aiming at [an occasional and

noncommittal interest] with an interplay of people. Movements, and tape
recorders called “An Aesthetic of Engagement”; unfortunately, there was
nothing to show for the experience but a short description and a few pho-
tographs. (Chapin 1971)
By examining how the performative gesture is affected by documenta-

tion, we can determine how the institutional setting frames the experience
of the work of art and the conditions of its communication. This helps
us locate the different historical and historiographical contexts of art and
navigate our way through what appears to be an impenetrable archival
80 E. KALYVA
order, which shrouds the work while serving multiple interests and
becomes more complex and convoluted as time progresses. We can also
trace what an artistic act fails to communicate and the reasons of this fail-
ure. Muted, flattened and fixed on the wall as it may be, Tape-Recorder
Project (6) still allows us to trace a critical potential. One of the reasons
is that recording was structurally incorporated into its production and
functioned as a means of interactive communication. As was the case of
photographs in Arnatt and of film documentation in Breakwell, there is a
qualitative difference between a work that uses and critically engages with
these media, and their use for exhibition and preservation purposes after
the event.
3.5 Art and Violence in the Open Air:

The Activities of CAYC
In The Wretched of the Earth (1963 [1961]), Frantz Fanon analyses vio-
lence, corruption and the multifaceted operations of ideology, and the
challenges that the decolonisation struggle faces given the extension of
colonial domination into the social life of the colonised. Fanon writes
with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) in mind; his book
was translated from French to Spanish in 1963 and resonates well with
the Latin American context. This context is shaped by the imperative
of liberation, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and “the new man” as
described by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, on the one hand, and on the
other, consecutive military dictatorships that served the political and
financial interests of foreign powers and mainly the US. These de facto
governments employed tactics of warfare previously used in Algeria and,
with the support of the social elite, repressed any positive social change.
The Argentine civic-military dictatorship of 1966–73—precursor to a
much more brutal dictatorship to come—implemented a series of neo-
liberal experiments that resulted in consequent financial crises. It was
responsible for the systematic dissolution of public life, the death, torture
and exile of almost an entire generation, and the censorship and control
of educational institutions and cultural outlets. Big corporations, finan-
cially supported by North American institutions, propagated correspond-
ing ideology, centralised cultural production and controlled the media.
A notable gatekeeper was the di Tella Institute, part of the Siam-di Tella
group and recipient of funds from the Ford Foundation. At the same time,
the regime’s propaganda was readily disseminated by the press alongside
sensationalism and consumerist culture. In this context of dependence
and interventionism, a new gap emerged between elite and mass cul-
ture (García Canclini 2005). By the end of the 1960s, however, the dis-
course on the internationalisation of culture that had been predominant
in the 1950s and 1960s became challenged for being explicitly part of
the hegemonic project of the US (Herrera 1997).
The civico-military dictatorships systematically installed violence in
everyday life. This increasing violence was discursively and ethically legiti-
mised, but also masked and trivialised. Apart from references to violence
in political and corporate discourse, violence was also exemplified in a
stylistically excessive and romanticising aesthetic, with the idea of bear-
ing guns incorporated into the marketing of a wide range of consumer
goods. Anything from football, high-profile love stories and fashion to
cars and chocolates was launched with a rifle in hand and associated with
social values of integrity, self-reliance, accomplishment, masculinity and
sex appeal.6 The pages of popular magazines such as Gente and Claudia
are good examples. There, the image of people shooting out of cars such
as Ford Fairlane and Peugeot 504—brands typically associated with insti-
tutional and paramilitary agents—is converted into a mythical image of
the sexy rebel. This kind of visual overexposure and discursive trivialisation
is part of a process of naturalisation of violence, to recall Barthes—a pro-
cess by which torture, kidnapping and murder are rendered as common
aspects of social reality.
In art, the presence of violence can be negotiated in different ways.
One is the thematic representation of violence in allegorical painting or
monumental sculpture for example, which directly or indirectly invites
ethical questions about verisimilitude and affect. From a different per-
spective, the violence of social revolutions in the process of the genesis of
the new finds a conceptual parallel in the idea of the artistic avant-garde,
which has been theorised as causing breaks or ruptures in the art tradition.
John Roberts (2007) examines avant-garde and neo-avant-garde theories
such as those of Theodor Adorno and Peter Bürger, and proposes recon-
sidering the avant-garde both as an event and as a temporal process where
the artistic act can tear the texture of reality apart without warning and
break pre-existing symbolic networks. We could add that these networks
6
My thanks to Sebastián Carassai for drawing my attention to this.
82 E. KALYVA
need not only be symbolic but can also concern the discursive and material
structures that frame artistic activity, its interests and functions and that
situate art within a broader social context.
The following discussion extends the analysis of the performative ges-
ture in artworks that advance not only an institutional critique but also a
socio-political one. It examines how critically engaged artworks can break,
or at least disturb, pre-existing orders of the symbolic, the discursive and
the material, and open a space for reflection both on art and on the social
context within which these orders are actualised. As case studies, this sec-
tion discusses two seminal exhibitions organised by the Centre of Art and
Communication (CAYC) in Buenos Aires: Arte de Sistemas I [Art of Systems I]
(19 July–22 August 1971) and Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre [Art
and Ideology/CAYC in the open air], the latter part of Arte de Sistemas II
(21 September–8 October (1972). As previously mentioned, CAYC had
a very active national and international programme, and formed part of a
triangle of exchanges with the UK and the US. It was amongst the most
important nuclei of conceptual art in Latin America, and the artworks asso-
ciated with it enjoy notable national and international interest today. These
circuits support historically the comparative study between the work of
artists associated with CAYC and conceptual art practices from elsewhere.
Furthermore, considering works from Argentina exemplifies conceptual
art’s socio-political critique in violent environments and can set a frame-
work for the analysis of other examples from Latin America and beyond.
The artworks in these exhibitions expose the public space as a non-
neutral site of ideological operations and reveal the material and discursive
violence of everyday life. They appropriate, recontextualise and juxtapose
objects and meaning, and re-semiotise referents and value. They operate
between what one sees and what one reads, generate questions about the
relation between art and politics, ethical responsibility, cultural memory
and national identity, and seek to recover social reality from its mediation.
They reinscribe a fragmented public space as a politically potent site, and
create possibilities for thinking and acting differently.
Returning to the discussion about violence, it is important to under-
stand its cause-and-effect relation with social reality—to understand, in
other words, from where violence originates (in this case, the systemic vio-
lence of the dictatorial regime), and the acts that seek to resist and cancel
it. Indeed, socially aware and politically committed artists from this period
make the distinction between repressive state violence, on the one hand,
and violence as a force of historical transformation, on the other.
The performative act relies on certain conditions of communication and

can be used self-reflectively to uncover and contest these conditions. As we
have seen, context conditions the use of language and language reproduces
and affirms social behaviours and ideologies. Therefore, by understand-
ing how a performative gesture operates, we can detect the social rela-
tions, norms and conventions that make it possible, as well as their limits.
To put it differently, we can determine how the meaning-making process
is normalised. If the performative gesture misfires—if it fails to be carried
out because the procedure or the participants were inadequate—then it
becomes a matter of statement and recognition. But what if failure is used as
a critical strategy to invert the literal and the figurative and to push the limits
of consensus? This does not only refer to institutional logic and how it mys-
tifies artistic production and seeks to preserve the validity of its authority
to do so. Besides, the ruling class in Argentina had widely incorporated the
dogma of American modernism and its ideological premises. More critically,
consensus is with reference to social reality and the relation to and respon-
sibility of art towards it. The re-negotiation of the idealogical isolation of
art from social life becomes imperative in a much more hostile environment
that naturalises violence and sanctions repression.
It would be naïve to think that an artwork, as a single event, can dis-
place social order and redefine how it is materially supported and discur-
sively reproduced. But it can demonstrate the critical potential and social
function of art as a transformative social praxis: an activity that reflects
upon the world and seeks to change it, and that at the same time critically
reflects upon its own condition and relation to that world (Kalyva 2016).
Conceptual artworks from Argentina from the early 1970s juxtapose words
and images in order to cause shifts in their apprehension, and to expose the
mechanisms that censor communication and sustain violence, repression
and social alienation. They offer new modalities for reading an artwork
and its surrounding environment, and specifically advance a reflective mode
of engaging with context that is initially performed on the artwork’s own
body in order to initiate a critical strategy for reading the world.
3.5.1 Conceptual Art and Conceptualism

In recent years, there has been a tendency to differentiate between “con-
ceptual art”, generally used to refer to canonical Anglo-American activi-
ties, and “conceptualism”, used to cover everything else. In the historical
context of conceptual art, however, such terms were used interchangeably.
84 E. KALYVA
On the contrary, a distinction that does arise is between critically engaged

practices and apolitical or tautological ones. Both Jorge Glusberg (1972;
AdSII 1972b) and Simon Marchán Fiz (1972) discuss Latin American art
and the challenges that it had to face in its context of military oppression,
imperialist exploitation and economic dependency; and a type of conceptual
art or ideological conceptualism that, particular to the Latin American situ-
ation, seeks to expose the workings of ideology and recover the codes of
communication with respect to real life as opposed to an apolitical, linguis-
tic conceptualism that is tautological. We can detect the latter in the work of
artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Huebler and Gilbert & George, for example,
but not in the work of Arnatt, Art & Language or Victor Burgin even though
their institutional critique would appear quite “tamed” in comparison to
the socio-political critique of their Argentine contemporaries. Moreover,
Luis Camnitzer (2007) develops an analysis of conceptualist critical strate-
gies that extend beyond art. Camnitzer traces conceptual art practices from
South America with reference to their own artistic and political traditions
such as Mexican muralism and Cuban revolutionary art, but also to urban
guerrillas and national liberation movements such as the Tupamaros in
Uruguay. With this socio-political background in mind, Camnitzer argues
that conceptual art practices from Latin America advanced a demand for
contextualisation rather than dematerialisation, challenged the notion of a
disinterested aesthetic and sought to reinsert art into the praxis of life.
The distinction, therefore, between conceptual art and conceptualism
has a historical dimension. It also has a historiographical one. Not so many
years ago, the discussions around conceptual art would trace the origin of
the movement by citing Henry Flynt. That Flynt (1963 [1961]) spoke of
“concept art” was treated as a linguistic oversight, as was the reference to
Sol LeWitt. LeWitt (1967, 1969) did use the word “conceptual” in his
famous theses that prioritised the idea behind the realisation of the work,
and how it could become the work; he also applied the principle of modu-
lar logic in his own practice, but he was not a conceptual artist himself.
While these citations contribute to our understanding of the historical
context of conceptual art—for example, by describing the New York art
scene of the mid to late 1960s—it is also quite important to underline
their discursive value. Specifically, they help shape and establish a particular
reading of (American) conceptual art as developing out of post-minimalist
interests, on the one hand, and as interested in a tautological and inter-
nalised enquiry into perception, on the other. This is a very Greenbergian
conception of a linear artistic development and is common among critics
of the modernist tradition such as Rosalind Krauss and the October group.
At the time of the event, there were networks, dialogues and exchanges
between artists as well as collaborations and common interests but there
was hardly any single, unifying programme, let alone a global one. As
Harrison (1988) notes, no other such brief period in the history of art has
witnessed so many attempts to name a movement or to distinguish its fac-
tions: post-object art, multiformal art, non-rigid art, idea art, earthworks,
organic-matter art, process art, procedural art, anti-form art, systems art,
micro-emotive art, possible art, impossible art, post-studio art, meta-art.
Apart from these denominations, contemporary reiterations of con-
ceptual art based on new scholarship and propelled by its rising market
value further bring “the global” to the table. The touring exhibition
Global Conceptualisms (1999) sought to establish the distinction between
hegemonic centre/periphery and to highlight the hegemonic structures
embedded in art historical enquiry. To do so, it brought together a vast
array of works from different geo-political sites and periods without estab-
lishing their historical relevance, if any, and called upon their use of lan-
guage in any kind and form as their common denominator. The exhibition
has been criticised for offering a particularly narrow and polarised analysis
of its subject matter (López 2010), and for its use of the term “conceptu-
alism”, which is now understood as denoting a discursive context for talk-
ing about non-Western art practices (Longoni 2007; Davis 2008).
The blind spot of Global Conceptualisms and many of the ensuing debates
and exhibitions is that while they may seek to reveal the hegemonic practices
of art history, they often do so by reclassifying and reevaluating conceptual
art from a very particular point of view that has to do with the use of lan-
guage. As a historiographical practice, this suffers from two epistemological
fallacies. First, it replays a non-tentative generalisation regarding the exclu-
sively tautological use of language in (Western) conceptual art that, as this
book demonstrates, is not the case. Second, it uses the presence of language
to also classify all other cases under the umbrella term “conceptualism” and
deems their use of language to be ipso facto critical. In this case, turning to
“language” in order to evaluate a whole range of practices geographically,
while overlooking the difference between self-referentiality (which corrobo-
rates the modernist pursuit for purity and abstraction) and self-relfectivity
(which was used to contest the isolation of art from its social context) arrives
at the same dead end: it animates an equally hegemonic dissolution of alter-
native references that different conceptual art practices had as part of a cul-
tural production—references that were both aesthetic and critical-political.
86 E. KALYVA
3.5.2 Inversion, Art and Violence

CAYC was established in 1968 under the direction of Jorge Glusberg,
a critic, essayist, president of the Argentine section of the International
Association of Art Critics (1978–86) and later director of the National
Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires (1994–2003). The centre was active
through two of the most overtly oppressive dictatorships in Latin America
(1966–73 and 1976–83). Evolving around the Group of the Thirteen
[Grupo de los Trece], CAYC brought together art, design, theory, soci-
ology, literature and architecture.7 It organised numerous innovative
exhibitions, public lectures and conferences, and produced a plethora of
publications. It promoted the critical engagement with different modes of
communication and the study of art as a semiotic system, and advanced
a sociological examination of art and its function in society under differ-
ent institutional and ideological regimes. It had a national and interna-
tional network of contacts which included Harrison, Lucy Lippard, Seth
Siegelaub, Kosuth, Joseph Beuys and Umberto Eco and who organised
exhibitions or delivered lectures at CAYC. The exhibitions of CAYC toured
throughout Argentina and other Latin American countries such as Brazil,
Colombia and Ecuador, the US, Japan and Europe including France,
Iceland and the UK (see From Figuration to Systems Art in Argentina,
1971, Camden Arts Centre and Art Systems in Latin America, 1974–75,
ICA). These exhibitions presented works that examined the systems of
signification and communication, encouraged the active participation of
the viewer, engaged social reality and aimed to expose state propaganda,
foreign exploitation and the workings of ideology.
CAYC’s activities were framed by a background context of arguably much
more politically committed artistic practice from the late 1960s. Artists such as
León Ferrari, Roberto Jacoby, Graciela Carnevale and Eduardo Ruano chal-
lenged the function of institutions, sought to break the isolation of art from
life, raised awareness about social reality and sided with political mobilisation
and armed struggle. In 1968, the I Encuentro Nacional de Arte de Vanguardia
[I National Conference of Avant-Garde Art] focused on the nature of art’s par-
ticipation in revolutionary struggle. Other activities from this year included:
Carnevale’s Acción del Encierro (1968) (translated as an act of confinement,
7
The initial members of the group were Jacques Bedel, Luis Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny,
Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Vicente Marotta, Jorge González Mir, Luis Pazos, Alberto
Pellegrino, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, Julio Teich and Glusberg but this con-
figuration changed quickly. Horacio Zabala is already mentioned as part of the group by
1972 while Ginzburg, Teich and Dujovny leave Argentina in 1975 to go into self-exile.
Pazos and Romero distance themselves from the group from 1977 onwards.
or sit-in), for which the gallery audience was locked inside the gallery for an
hour during the opening of the show as part of the Ciclo de Arte Experimental
[Series of Experimental Art] organised by the Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia
de Rosario; the boycott of the prestigious Braque prize and the interrup-
tion of the inauguration of the Ver y Estimar prize; the interruption of a lec-
ture by the prominent art critic and director of the di Tella Institute Romero
Brest and the return of the Institute’s funds; and the self-closure of di Tella’s
exhibition Experiencias ’68 where artists removed their works and destroyed
them in front of the Institute in protest at the censorship of Roberto Plate’s
El Baño (1968) [The Bathroom]. Another very important project pre-dating
the activities discussed here was Tucumán Arde (1968) (Kalyva 2016).
Advancing the idea of the artist as social investigator, this compound and
multifaceted project called for a new form of artistic creation, which it defined
as a violent and collective act, deriving from socio-political consciousness and
destroying the bourgeois myth of the artist’s individuality and of the unique
and passive artwork. Marking a historical turn in artistic practice towards
socio-political commitment and responsibility (what today has been defined
as “social practice”), the declaration of Tucumán Arde moreover specified
revolutionary art as a total art since it proposes to modify the social structure,
as transformative in its negation of the separation between art and the world,
and as social in seeking to become part of the revolutionary struggle against
oppression and financial dependency (TA 1968; original emphasis).
CAYC’s Arte de Sistemas I (1971) was a large-scale exhibition. It took
place at the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires (MAMBA) and included
conferences, talks, artists’ books and film projections. It presented work
by almost 90 national and international artists including most of the key
names involved in international conceptual art exhibitions (Acconci, Kawara,
Baldessari, Bochner, Haacke, Huebler, Graham, Kaprow, Kosuth, Weiner,
Christo, Breakwell, Gilbert & George, Latham, Long a.a.). Argentine partici-
pation included works by, among others, the Group of the Thirteen, Carlos
Ginzburg, Luis Pazos and Juan Carlos Romero and was later expanded
to form the touring exhibition Hacia un Perfil del Arte Latinoamericano
(1972–74) [Towards a Profile of Latin American Art], which circulated
nationally and internationally. The format of the exhibition catalogue of Arte
de Sistemas I was based on loose pages similar to the cards used by Lippard
for her touring shows in Seattle (1969), Vancouver (1970) and Buenos
Aires (1970–71). This format transformed the exhibition catalogue into a
less hierarchical space where the involvement of the expert and stakeholder
in framing art (the curator, the museum director) was minimised. Instead,
the participating artists were invited to present their own ideas, reflections
88 E. KALYVA
and work. The exhibition catalogue of Arte de Sistemas I also enhanced the
international networks that were forming around conceptual art by includ-
ing, among other things, stills from Breakwell’s UNWORD and a citation by
Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim, regarding the cancellation of
Haacke’s 1971 exhibition.
A particularly engaging work was Ginzburg’s Tierra (1971) [Earth]
(Figs. 3.6 and 3.7). It consisted of a series of placards and notes that were
placed on the fence of an empty plot opposite the museum building and con-
tinued through its staircase, elevator and the ninth floor. These announced
that “an aesthetic experience” was taking place within that plot, and encour-
aged the passer-by to enter the museum—indicated by the demonstrative
“here opposite”—in order to find out more. If one complied and followed
the indications, one would arrive at the museum’s top floor and find the
words “look here”, readable from the outside, glued on the windows. If one
looked out of the window, one would see the plot across the street from
where the “experience” had started and the word “tierra” written with large
Fig. 3.6 Carlos Ginzburg, Tierra (1971) at the exhibition Arte de Sistemas I, 19
July–22 August 1971. Fibre inkjet black and white print mounted on acid free
museum board. 8 photographs, 10 3/8 × 14 1/4 inches (26.3 × 36.2 cm) each.
(Detail) CAYC/Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires (© Carlos Ginzburg.
Courtesy of the artist and Henrique Faria, New York)
Fig. 3.7 Carlos

Ginzburg, Tierra (1971)
at the exhibition Arte de
Sistemas I, 19 July–22
August 1971. Fibre
inkjet black and white
print mounted on acid
free museum board. 8
photographs, 10 3/8 ×
14 1/4 inches (26.3 ×
36.2 cm) each. (Detail)
CAYC/Museum of
Modern Art, Buenos
Aires (© Carlos
Ginzburg. Courtesy of
the artist and Henrique
Faria, New York)
capital letters across it. This work as well as other interventions by Ginzburg
such as labelling a tree “tree” and a rock “rock” initiate an interplay between
what one sees and what one reads. This interplay aims to demonstrate how
signification and the meaning-making process are structured and can there-
fore be restructured. As the artist explains, the artistic message can critically
replace the definitive values between signals and objects that are established
by the linguistic system with new dynamic ones (CAYC 1971). Within the
context of state propaganda, military repression, terror and alienation, such
acts not only recover the “obvious” but try to reclaim public space and
reverse an already inverted social reality.
Let us consider the conditions of the work’s communication more closely.
At a first level, Tierra operates on the borderline between the inside and the
outside of the museum, treating it as that which isolates art from life and
helps maintain a disjointed experience of social reality. Rather than claiming
to have a body of its own, the work juxtaposes its textual components with
what one sees around her and urges the passer-by to leave the street and enter
90 E. KALYVA
the museum. However, the work does not aim to transform a passive passer-
by into an active participant simply by having him or her moving through the
museum, or to reveal the plot as something that it is not simply by looking.
More critically, it transforms the object of engagement. Promising to reward
the spectator with an “unexpected aesthetic experience”, what is experienced
is a series of inversions: of the gallery space as a container for art, of public
space as a private and heavily regulated site, and of the act of naming as a
non-neutral and ideologically charged act. The work’s performative gesture
transforms its contents—what would otherwise be simple descriptions or
statements—by juxtaposing them with the site of their display. Now, they
become the means by which the experience of art, as well as the experience of
public space and of reality, are mediated. In the guise of art, the act of viewing
(or of bearing witness) and of existing are turned inside out and upside down
both structurally and discursively. Standing behind a glass window at the
intersection of private/public and social/artistic, the gallery visitor is forced
to confront reality. In the Argentina of the 1970s, this social reality is con-
stantly being inverted by official discourse and the press: people are not mur-
dered by the regime but they “simply” disappear; there is no armed conflict,
let alone with the CIA’s involvement, but simply military “exercises”; the
wealth of one’s homeland is not being plundered but “invested”; the posses-
sions of those detained and murdered are not appropriated but “donated”;
and the victims’ children are not abducted but raised by “relatives”. To draw
attention to this inversion of reality, Ginzburg’s Tierra reverses its own body.
It mediates its own experience and redirects it back to the real world where
the fenced and muted earth stands for the real object that it is should one be
willing to look and see.
Another work that performs inversion is Experiencias realizadas: 1969–71
(1969–71) [Executed experiences] by the Grupo Experiencias Estéticas
[Aesthetic Experiences Group], consisting of Pazos, Héctor Puppo and
Jorge de Luján Gutiérrez. Two such experiences were La cultura de la feli-
cidad (1971) [The culture of happiness] and Secuestro (1971) [Kidnapping]
(Figs. 3.8 and 3.9). The first consisted of a paper mask of a smiling face that
was given out at the opening of the exhibition, while photographic stills of
its sample use hung on the walls. These included everyday scenes of a family
sitting together, meeting friends, a couple in bed and a murder scene. This
is one inversion, where a violent act is recontextualised and made to appear
as equally common and natural as the other depicted scenes. Second, the
smiling mask had instructions printed on it that declared its obligatory use,
forbade any thought, word or act against its purported state and outlined
ten commands of complete obedience. These were signed “triumvirate”.
This connotes the collaboration of the Catholic Church with the military
Fig. 3.8 Grupo Experiencias Estéticas (Luis Pazos, Héctor Puppo and Jorge de
Luján Gutiérrez), La cultura de la felicidad (1971) at the exhibition Arte de
Sistemas I, 19 July–22 August 1971. Photographic print. CAYC/Museum of
Modern Art, Buenos Aires
regime, the heavy regulation of public life across all levels of activity and the
Triple A. Standing for the “Argentine Anticommunist Alliance”, the Triple
A was a far-right death squad officially established in 1973 and responsible
for the systematic kidnapping, torture and extermination of thousands of
people. The second experience, Secuestro, consisted of a note regarding
Glusberg’s presumed kidnapping that had circulated in the press and was
handed out at the show’s opening. This drew attention to the function of
the press in shaping and maintaining a reign of terror and insecurity.
These “experiences” play out the contrast between appearance and what
is hidden under the surface of that which is in plain view (an international
art exhibition, familiar scenes of everyday happiness, news reports). They
perform an inversion of the already inverted reality and of the banalisation
of violence. Yet this is not achieved through simple means such as asking
one to put on a mask or to go to an exhibition in order to verify whether
its organiser was really kidnapped. Rather, the juxtaposition of descriptions
and commands with an act that has already been staged duplicates the refer-
ent and suspends the temporality of the experience and its representation.
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Fig. 3.9 Grupo Experiencias Estéticas (Luis Pazos, Héctor Puppo and Jorge de
Luján Gutiérrez), La cultura de la felicidad (1971) at the exhibition Arte de
Sistemas I, 19 July–22 August 1971. Photographic print. CAYC/Museum of
Modern Art, Buenos Aires
In order to be able to recognise what one sees and for these “aesthetic expe-
riences” to communicate, one must confront reality and upset certain norms
of behaviour. At a more critical level, therefore, the work not only stages
reality but draws to the surface norms that dictate that one look the other
way, refrain from asking questions and take things as they are presented.
In its presented setting, the work’s performative gesture can only fail
to be carried out correctly and completely by an adequate procedure and
appropriate persons. (To recall Austin, it misfires.) In its failure, it reveals the
resistance by the interpreting community to acknowledge the systematic vio-
lence and repression that define one’s daily life. Presence and absence, violence
and everyday life are inverted by the work’s reenactment of smiling faces and
violent acts. Crucially, this reenactment shifts the responsibility of recognition
and subsequent conduct to the viewer. In this way, the work self-reflectively
exposes the assumptions on which its communication relies as well as the
limits of this communication (that is, the extent to which its own propositions
make sense) as profoundly ideological. In other words, it once reveals what is
at stake and the cost of this realisation. For if the work fails in its artificiality to
convince anyone, this means that it can only be a parody of that which really is.
The following year, CAYC’s Arte de Sistemas II (1972) presented some

800 works by nearly 200 artists. It was divided into three sections. The inter-
national section was hosted at the Museum of Modern Art. It showed works
by better- and lesser-known artists and of mixed media including experimen-
tal music by John Cage. Argentina’s participation was located at CAYC’s
building. Finally, an open-air exhibition took place at Roberto Arlt Square. It
was inaugurated on 23 September 1972 and entitled Arte e Ideología/CAYC
al aire libre [Art and Ideology/CAYC in the open air]. It is also referred to as
Escultura, Follaje y Ruidos II [Sculpture, Foliage and Noises II] after a 1970
CAYC exhibition at Rubén Darío Square. Arte e Ideología p resented around
60 artists and a variety of means and methods to engage socio-political real-
ity, incite wider participation and test the limits of censorship. The organisers
had also announced a printmaking and a photography competition with the
subjects “Printmaking and national reality” and “Photography: art and ideol-
ogy” respectively, whose winners would be included in this public exhibition
(La Nación 1972; Clarín 1972a).
According to its publicity, CAYC al aire libre (which literally translates
“CAYC in the free air”) wanted to move out of the elite site of the museum
and “win the street in order to talk with the people of Buenos Aires” (AdSII
1972a; translation by author). Marking its political interest from a Marxist
standpoint, the exhibition brochure cites Louis Althusser’s discussion on the
relationship between ideological and aesthetic practice. In his discussion of
“ideological state apparatuses”, Althusser (1971 [1970]) explains how insti-
tutions and organisations like marriage and the army produce and propagate
ideology—an act by which they also ensure their own cohesion and reproduc-
tion. Likewise for art as a system of aesthetic practice, it propagates the ideol-
ogy of the culture if forms part. Nonetheless, Althusser argues, a work of art
can separate itself and put forward a critique of the ideology that it helps con-
vey. In another exhibition brochure, Glusberg discusses international concep-
tual art and makes the distinction between “ideological conceptualism” and
“tautological conceptualism” as previously mentioned; and argues that while
there is no such thing as a single Latin American art, there is a common Latin
American problematic that derives from its revolutionary situation (AdSII
1972b). Likewise, while it is different being an artist in Latin America from
being an artist in Europe or the US, Glusberg continues, the role of the artist
remains conditioned by corresponding power relations. For this reason, one
must investigate the semiotic conditions of the aesthetic effect, examine the
function of artistic creation in relation to social power structures and reveal
the semantic contradictions in the dominant discourse as a series of binaries:
life versus death, violence versus pacifism, consumed versus desired, symbolic
versus everyday, historical versus actual (AdSII 1972b).
94 E. KALYVA
Let us consider some of the works presented at the Roberto Arlt Square,

a small public square in the centre of Buenos Aires. Joseph Beuys prepared
a carrier bag that diagrammatically presented his thesis on the difference
between direct democracy and a state governed by political parties. (These
diagrams had been presented in poster format earlier that year in London,
at the Tate’s Seven Exhibitions, together with a text on the organisation for
direct democracy by referendum, which was one of Beuys’s main projects.)
With the title Comparación entre dos tipos de sociedades: La forma de destruir
la dictadura de los partidos (1972) [Comparison between two types of societies:
the way to destroy the dictatorship of the parties], the bag illustrated the monop-
oly of power by political parties and the lack of participation in the commons
by the people. It was moreover used as a carrier bag for the exhibition’s bro-
chures. In this way, the contents of the latter, as well as of Beuys’s work, were
circulated both materially and discursively (Figs. 3.10 and 3.11).
Pazos called for an art for the people that is clear, ethical, committed
and violent “like every expression of the people who struggle for their lib-
eration” (AdSII 1972c; translation by author). His clearly titled Proyecto
de monumento al prisionero político desaparecido (1972) [Project for a mon-
ument to the disappeared political prisoner] consisted of three tombstones;
at some point, three people lay in front of them. Even without this title,
erecting tombstones in a public square is a striking enough juxtaposition
to shift the chain of signification. If one is to understand what one is
seeing—three unmarked graves—one is also confronted with the realisa-
tion that those disappeared were in fact dead, something that the mili-
tary regime repeatedly denied. At a second level, the act of lying in front
of these tombstones makes a performative gesture that generates visual
similarities to those dead bodies that sporadically appeared throughout the
country and whose pictures were blatantly reproduced by the press. This
image of cadavers, whose violence the press banalised through excessive
reproduction, is now recontextualised and placed in the centre of the city,
disturbing what would otherwise be a normal day out. One might take
this as an illustration of giving up and accepting death. Yet the work resists
this defeatist reading because the interplay across its title, structure and
placement in a public square pushes consensus, recognition and accep-
tance to the limits. In this way, Pazos’s work retains its critical interest in
uncovering social reality and demonstrates that the idea of offering one’s
life for a valid political cause not only cannot be ignored but must be hon-
oured (Fig. 3.12).
Pazos also collaborated with Roberto Duarte Laferriere, Eduardo
Leonetti and Ricardo Roux for the work La realidad subterránea (1972)
Fig. 3.10 Joseph Beuys, Comparación entre dos tipos de sociedades: La forma de
destruir la dictadura de los partidos (1972). (Side A) Bag circulated at the exhibi-
tion Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre, September 1972. Roberto Arlt Square,
Buenos Aires. Part of Arte de Sistemas II, 21 September–8 October 1972. CAYC/
Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires
[The underground reality]. This work occupied an underground cavity used

for municipal maintenance works to display photographs from Nazi con-
centration camps. Back on the surface, the adjacent wall was decorated with
16 white crosses and the work’s title. The crosses convey the idea of death
96 E. KALYVA
Fig. 3.11 Joseph Beuys, Comparación entre dos tipos de sociedades: La forma de
destruir la dictadura de los partidos (1972). (Side B) Bag circulated at the exhibi-
tion Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre, September 1972. Roberto Arlt Square,
Fig. 3.12 Installation view of Luis Pazos, Proyecto de monumento al prisionero

político desaparecido (1972) at the exhibition Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre,
September 1972. Roberto Arlt Square, Buenos Aires. Part of Arte de Sistemas II,
21 September–8 October 1972. CAYC/Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires
and mourning but also make a clear reference to the execution of 16 politi-
cal prisoners by the military on 22 August 1972, who had been recaptured
after trying to escape Rawson prison, Trelew. Inside the cave, the referent
of the displayed images was more ambiguous. They could be read for their
historical reference (a reference that was also used to avoid censorship) or as
contemporary. Even in the former case however, such atrocities by another
right-wing military regime would be superimposed on the Argentine con-
text. As for its placement in a dark space into which the visitor had to lower
herself via a ladder, the work not only juxtaposed the idea of entombment
and confinement but also the cover-up of systematic everyday violence.
It should be clear by now how juxtaposing what one sees and what
one reads as well as different objects, practices and attitudes generates
additional meaning. Because of its placement, La realidad subterránea
visually conceals the otherwise literal message of its contents. It utilises
an apparent historical reference as its foundation—a reference that the
regime revered and evoked—and unearths the reality and consequences
98 E. KALYVA
Fig. 3.13 Installation view of Roberto Duarte Laferriere, Eduardo Leonetti,

Luis Pazos and Ricardo Roux, La realidad subterránea (1972) at the exhibition
Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre, September 1972. Roberto Arlt Square,
of that same historical reference which the regime attempted to conceal.

Even the mainstream press reported how the public interacted with the
work by writing political slogans in direct reference to the national cir-
cumstances on the underground images, as it had intereacted by lying in
front of Pazos’s tombstones (La Opinión 1972). In this reign of terror,
not only art but also the media employ rhetorical tropes. But as the work’s
performative intervention across social reality, history and public space
demonstrates, the effects of this reign of terror are quite literally inscribed
on the surface of reality (Figs. 3.13 and 3.14).
Most of the works in the exhibition CAYC al aire libre critically chal-
lenged the violent social conditions of everyday life and the public’s pas-
sive attitude by advancing a performative gesture that oscillated between
the symbolic and the material, the literal and the figural. Horacio Zabala’s
300 metros de cinta negra para enlutar una plaza pública (1972) [300
metres of black tape to mourn a public square] did precisely that: it marked
off what would be considered a public space—a space that was fragmented
Fig. 3.14 Installation view of Roberto Duarte Laferriere, Eduardo Leonetti,

Luis Pazos and Ricardo Roux, La realidad subterránea (1972) at the exhibition
Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre, September 1972. Roberto Arlt Square,
and heavily surveilled—in order to demarcate the silenced mourning of a

people as a public affair. Setting a more active presence, Victor Grippo and
Jorge Gamarra operated a clay oven to bake and freely distribute bread
with the objective, as they explained, to reassess both daily attitudes, such
as isolation and individualism, and artistic production with reference to
real life (AdSII 1972c).
The last example is El juego lúgubre (1972) [The macabre game] by
Romero, Leonetti, Roux and Pazos (Fig. 3.15). In the exhibition catalogue,
Romero discusses the difference between repressive and liberating violence.
He cites George Bataille and explains how violence can become part of an
artistic proposition as a means to respond to and reduce repressive social
violence (AdSII 1972c). Indeed, El juego lúgubre relied on the public’s
participation and played out the extents of the latter’s compliance towards
violence. The work consisted of a rope hanging from a hook and ending in
a noose, along with instructions for a game between two or more people.
100 E. KALYVA
Fig. 3.15 Installation

view of Roberto Duarte
Laferriere, Eduardo
Leonetti, Luis Pazos,
Juan Carlos Romero and
Ricardo Roux, El juego
lúgubre (1972) at the
exhibition Arte e
Ideología/CAYC al aire
libre, September 1972.
Roberto Arlt Square,
Buenos Aires. Part of
Arte de Sistemas II, 21
September–8 October
1972. CAYC/Museum
of Modern Art, Buenos
Aires
These were set as “dialectical opposites” and in order to win, the player who
started at the end of the rope had to reach the noose by confronting the
player or players who stood around it (AdSII 1972c). The work creates a
setting where repressive violence generates violence but also the conditions
for that which will undo it. This includes liberating violence as part of the
socio-political struggle. This dialectical setting is both allegorical of state
violence and demonstrative of the complicity of Argentine society; like-
wise, it is both agitating and explicit about what is at stake. Weighed down
by the realisation that its proposition is quite literal once contrasted to
reality and enacted publicly, the work remains suspended. Its performative
gesture resides in its failure to offer any permanent resolution.
3.5.3 Closure, Enclosure and Exposure

Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre was visited by about 5,000 people and
was closed only two days after it opened (25 September). The works were
dismantled or otherwise destroyed under the supervision of the police in
the presence of the Secretary of Culture and Public Services, and loaded
by municipal workers onto a truck of the Explosives Brigade of the Federal
Police. Romero recalls that someone used a cigarette to pierce his balloon
Lunfardo [Slang] reading, in slang, “the repressor beats the detainee”;
being filled with helium, the balloon caught fire and that fuelled the claims
that the show was dangerous (quoted in Longoni and Mestman 2008,
449). As the exhibition’s organiser, Glusberg was requested to present
himself to the police (Glusberg 1985, 110).
The show’s predecessor, the exhibition at Rubén Darío Square in 1970,
was inaugurated by officials from the cultural administration of the munic-
ipality (Glusberg 1985, 107). In 1972, the exhibition was closed because
it had not respected public property, officials argued, and had instead
extended across the walls, lawns and pavements of the square; for others,
it moreover included “ideological connotations of an extremist hue” (La
Opinión 1972; translation by author). For its part, the leading mainstream
newspaper Clarín, largely responsible for portraying the military regime
as a law-abiding and legal government, clarified and defended the verdict
of the Criminal Chamber. According to its report, although the exhibition
had a clear political message, political manifestations were not only not
prohibited but in fact were protected by legal legislation (Clarín 1972c).
We could read this as a final inversion that the show successfully staged:
to bring the military and de facto government to declare its presumed
protection and promotion of civil rights vis-à-vis their contrary everyday
practices. Most certainly, it is not easy for an artistic act to contest the
narratives of the dominant ideology, or to challenge the range of institu-
tions and mechanisms for normalising experience and meaning that the
structures of power control at a systemic level. On the occasion of the
exhibition’s closure, Clarín did not miss out on the opportunity to sensa-
tionalise the event. By calling upon the watchful eyes of the international
community and a sentiment of exposure detrimental to national pride, it
reported that the British Embassy had requested the investigation of the
destruction of British artworks (Clarín 1972b). The article failed to clarify
that the international part of the exhibition was at the Museum of Modern
Art and not at Roberto Arlt Square.
The press also did not report that numerous international artists
including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Allan Kaprow sent letters of
support condemning the closure of the exhibition (Comunicado n°4
1972; Comunicado n°5 1972). Locally, the Grupo Cuestionamiento
[Questioning Group] that was formed by Leonetti, Pazos, Roux and
102 E. KALYVA
Romero prepared a text that explained the organic relationship between

the artists, in their public presence, and the public. Speaking of a case
of “cultural violence” by the administrators of culture, which prevented
people from accessing it, the group argued that “the isolation of the artists
from the people is one of the several constants that preserve the continuity
of the system” (Romero et al. 2010, 256–58; translation by author).
To break this isolation, the works discussed here manipulated the condi-
tions of their communication by self-reflectively using their own body to
achieve a critical inversion of reality. They engaged materially with urban
space (they inscribed it, surrounded it, enclosed it, ran under it) and devel-
oped more relevant and socially committed art forms in order to recover
social life from its heavy regulation by the military regime, which had ren-
dered it effectively individualised and privatised. In a context where exhibi-
tion censorship was the least of an artist’s problem, such works extended
beyond the museum space and the traditional and material framing of art.
They challenged the marketable and ideological isolation of art and dealt
with issues of violence, representation, memory and identity. As part of
their communication act, they appropriated, resignified, declared, prom-
ised, lured in, alluded and inverted aesthetic and social attitudes. They
interrogated social reality not only because of their theme at the level of
contents but also through their form by juxtaposing different languages,
sites and symbolic and discursive orders. This is a dynamic process that does
not limit itself to a simple transposition of some artistic proposition into a
new context. Rather, through a series of performative gestures that remain
inconclusive or misfire, such works expose how law and order (as imposed
from above) and the attitude of looking the other way (as reproduced by the
public) conceal and support a repressive and murderous state.
Works from Argentina in the 1970s offer a new paradigm for under-
standing the social function of art and the relation between art and
politics. They allow us to consider the coloniality of power and how its
mechanisms are installed within cultural production and mediate real-
ity. Moreover, in order to communicate effectively and make sense, they
require that the viewer also take responsibility. To clarify, the recontextu-
alisation and juxtaposition of something considered external to the cat-
egory of art—the use of language included—is not ipso facto critical. The
simple and unproblematic transposition of something (a word, an object)
somewhere else is an act whose autonomy from social context can effec-
tively be secured by an accordingly expanded category of art. On the con-
trary, the critical potential of an artistic gesture is located in how it opens
up a new space in order to contest the material and discursive structures
which contain and evaluate it as art, and to advance changes beyond art
within society itself.
3.6 Closing Remarks

One way of understanding how artworks communicate in context and what
is specified as that context is by considering their performative gesture. The
performative gesture is specified here as bringing about a certain effect that
is staged by the work. Austin’s discussion of speech acts demonstrates that
there can be no complete or exhaustive definition of things beyond doubt
or contradiction. Texts and images are actualised within certain discourses
and are accessible via a common ground of assumptions and presuppositions
as prerequisites of communication. Conventions contain an act in space and
time and, for this reason, one must examine how context materially and dis-
cursively shapes what is understood as being the work and the mutable rela-
tions across images, texts and audiences in the particularity of each case. The
opposite is also true: no context is stable by virtue of its own existence. Rather,
it must be stabilised, maintained and reproduced in consensus—for example,
through repressive structures, institutional practices and a compliant press.
Conceptual art practices juxtaposed images and texts, visual references,
attitudes and discourses that could be considered as external to the cat-
egory of art in order to challenge the frameworks that guide the apprehen-
sion of art as an object, as an autonomous category and as a placeholder
for dominant ideologies. To carry out such an endeavour, they found new
ways to generate and sustain shifts in meaning. These shifts can be traced
even when the act is transposed to different contexts and subjected to dif-
ferent organisational principles.
In Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction (1971), the juxtaposition of
image and text creates a temporal and conceptual tension that is sustained
by the work’s self-censorship and reveals the set logic of its condition:
institutional validation of art, on the one hand, and spectatorial desire, on
the other. In Louw’s Tape-Recorder Project (6) (1971), its staged inter-
action transforms the artist’s commands into promises and declarations
that must be constantly reaffirmed. In contrast, its two-dimensional docu-
mentation isolates the creative act in an unreachable time and space, and
validates the function of the museum to secure and order points of access
to what could have been but is not. In the exhibitions of CAYC, artworks
invert the chain of signification and operate across multiple competing
104 E. KALYVA
narratives that are simultaneously upheld by the public so as to make sense

of a highly contradictory, violent and repressive social reality.
In most cases, works arrive to us as contingent documents: images
of artworks, snapshots of performances, stills of videos. These are con-
ferred a status of art through institutional reclassification and market
reevaluations—a movement that reevaluates both the object and the
hosting institution by virtue of its holdings. The archival order becomes
a layer of validation wherein utterances and gestures acquire substance
by being committed to the enabling principle of the archive—namely the
power to establish origin. In parallel, historiographical discourse relocates
the artwork and can blur the boundaries between the act and its support
along different material and discursive axes and therefore at a theoreti-
cal and methodological level. Here, the task of the analysis is to identify
the mechanisms that legitimise such things as “the work proper” and the
“archive”, and how different formats and settings effectively shape what
we come to understand as the object in question, its function and limits.
Speech act theory provides a methodological framework for under-
standing how something functions in a given situation which is structured
according to sets of rules that the participants recognise, observe and enact.
It also allows us to understand the implications of an artistic gesture when
a work stages its own failure and the impossibility of it transgressing its
condition. In addition, acknowledging the dynamic relationship between
context and meaning-making helps us understand art as a transformative
social praxis and conceptualise the dialectics of art and criticism: how artistic
practices challenge and seek to change the condition of art within society at
the same time that they challenge and seek to change that society. Perhaps
this is one of the most important legacies of conceptual art. While the art-
work contests the channels through which it communicates and the value
systems that support it, its own provisional and often contradictory nature
does not entail the provisionality of its critique.
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CHAPTER 4
The Logico‐Semantics of Image and Text
One cannot guess how a word functions.

One has to look at its use and learn from that.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, §340; original emphasis)
4.1 Opening Remarks

Meaning is created socially and discursively. In capitalist societies where
different power structures create and maintain particular reading and
viewing regimes, it becomes difficult to defend any unmediated and intui-
tive experience of art or the world. As previously discussed, developments
in analytic philosophy from the 1950s onwards demonstrated that lan-
guage could no longer be considered as existing in some infallible state
of consciousness, be accountable for moral truth or support the code
model of a one-to-one correspondence between a word and its referent.
Material from this chapter has been previously published in El espacio público
del grabado: actividades en Argentina antes y después la última dictadura,
Afuera 13 (2013); La creación semiótica del espacio del arte: unas notas sobre
el arte conceptual, Caiana 3 (2013), available online at http://caiana.caia.
org.ar/template/caiana.php?pag=articles/article_2.php&obj=127&vol=3; and
Conceptual art and language: Introducing a logico-semantic analysis, Social
Semiotics 24(3) (2014), 283–301, available online at http://www.tandfonline.
com/doi/abs/10.1080/10350330.2014.896639.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5_4
112 E. KALYVA
Furthermore, the social history of art and cultural studies that developed
from the 1970s onwards interrogated the historical, social and ideological
premises of modernism and contested the currency of its aesthetic experi-
ence. The refutation of any universal meaning in linguistic or in pictorial
signs, together with the understanding of the ideological nature of repre-
sentation and interpretation, implicated the privileged status of the artistic
genius and led to reevaluations of the processes of artistic production.
The debate between a metaphysical approach to art as an autonomous
category versus a dialectical approach which acknowledges the relation of
art to society and history has clearly marked the historiography and evalua-
tion of conceptual art. This debate derives from two historically formulated
philosophical and political traditions: the Kantian judgement of taste and
universal truth, and the Marxist understanding of power relations and social
conditions which both shape and are articulated in the artwork. A typical,
conservative consideration of conceptual art in line with the Kantian tradi-
tion maintains that the use of language in these practices was a purist quest in
the development of art forms, or an attempt to replace the art-object and to
suppress the aesthetic experience, but which failed to do so (Buchloh 1990).
From this perspective and adhering to the principles of the American mod-
ernist art tradition, language is considered a legitimate means for the aes-
thetic exploration of perceptual and conceptual forms as long as it safeguards
the essential qualities of the category of art, individual expression and private
experience. This allows one to celebrate the self-sufficiency of tautological
statements and the supremacy of the idea in an artwork as if any such idea
could be wholly and directly preserved in some form and transmitted as such.
Another way of understanding conceptual art is to reject the first ten-
dency as reproducing the ideological premises of modernism, and to
locate the institutional or socio-political critique which an artistic practice
puts forward while acknowledging how it itself is subjected to the same
structures of power, discourse and value that it seeks to challenge. This
was often done by the use of juxtapositions of words, images and practices
that were traditionally and ideologically separated from the art context.
Such critically engaged works contested their communicational context
by leaving their execution inconclusive or by staging situations that con-
fronted the habitual modes of apprehension.
The previous chapter investigated the performative gesture of art. Another
way of examining how artworks manipulate the conditions of their commu-
nication is to analyse their logico-semantic relations. These refer to the rela-
tions between signs within linguistic structures at a functional level, and to
the relations between signs and extra-linguistic objects and discourses—the
THE LOGICO‐SEMANTICS OF IMAGE AND TEXT 113
semantic relations—in the meaning-making process. Rather than directly

applying the logico-semantic relations between linguistic clauses that
M.A.K. Halliday (2014 [1985]) established in his d evelopment of functional
grammar and the various taxonomies for image-text relations that derive
from it, this chapter takes a wider approach. It utilises resources from Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s examination of the logical relationship between propositions
and the world, and Halliday’s analysis of meaning-making and of language as
a social semiotic system. The reason is that existing taxonomies from socio-
linguistics and their extensions in multimodal communication are mainly
concerned with how an image functions in relation to a text in cases such as
illustrations, advertisement, graphic design and user manuals. They consider
expansion and projection (Martinec and Salway 2005) or decoration, reitera-
tion and development (Marsh and White 2003)—cases, in other words, of
collaboration between image and text rather than confrontation.
On the contrary, the following discussion focuses on the use of
juxtaposition as a strategy for creating shifts in and interrogating the
habitual modes of reading and viewing art and social reality more gener-
ally. Many conceptual artists were influenced by analytic philosophy and
employed a particular type of propositions in their work that must be
examined with this tradition in mind. Furthermore, because the visual
as opposed to the textual elements of conceptual art have been his-
torically framed within a particular context—that of modernist art—to
talk about extension, elaboration or projection as examples of logico-
semantic relations may explain the relation between image and text; but
it does not specify the interpretive frameworks within which conceptual
artworks were located and which, in turn, they challenged. The works
discussed here operate across multiple layers and shift meaning as this
is generated by their form and contents, their location and contextual
frameworks of interpretation. For this reason, the following analysis will
examine the work’s structural aspect (its formal presentation) and what
will be defined as its procedural aspect, which has to do with the activity
of reading and making sense.
As case studies, this chapter examines Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece
(1972, London), Victor Burgin’s Room (1970, London and Buenos Aires)
and Juan Carlos Romero’s Swift en Swift (1970, Buenos Aires). These
works offer new modalities for interrogating what is understood as being
the work and the site of its presentation. For their analysis, we will consider
the different types of language used including from philosophy and literature
and how their own stylistic qualities participate in the meaning-making
114 E. KALYVA
process. We will also consider the work as a system and the structuration of
meaning and experience beyond the work at the semantic plane. This chap-
ter returns to the relation of art to politics and examines how relocation
affects the experience of the work—in this case, from the gallery wall to the
catalogue page and from London to Buenos Aires. Finally, it will demon-
strate, in its historical dimension, the difference between arguing for the
precedence of some dematerialised idea in the work and using language to
create a situation which is staged by and recontextualises the work. It will
do so by discussing two seminal texts on conceptual art: Joseph Kosuth’s
Art after philosophy and Burgin’s Situational aesthetics, both published in
the same issue of Studio International in 1969.
The parallel discussion of these artists is not incidental: international
exchanges and networks of artists and critics characterise conceptual art.
Romero’s work was presented at Camden Arts Centre’s From Figuration
to Systems Art in Argentina (February 1971), organised by Jorge Glusberg,
the director of CAYC. Other participating artists included Antonio Berni,
Lea Lublin, Juan Pablo Renzi, Edgardo Antonio Vigo and Carlos Ginzburg,
whose work was discussed in Chapter 3. The Camden Arts Centre had
shown work by the Argentine artist David Lamelas in 1969 and pre-
sented Burgin’s Room at Idea Structures (June 1970) organised by Charles
Harrison. The exhibition also included works by Kosuth, who was in con-
tact with British artists and in particular Art & Language. Harrison also
organised Art as Idea from England (May 1971) at CAYC. Participating
artists included Arnatt and Burgin and the latter’s Room was on display.
Burgin had also participated in Lucy Lippard’s 2.972.453 (December
1970, CAYC), the third of her touring exhibitions previously shown at
Seattle (1969) and Vancouver (1970). His text Situational aesthetics was
mentioned in the exhibition catalogue. For his part, Kosuth inaugurated
his exhibition Joseph Kosuth. El arte como idea (June 1971) at CAYC with a
lecture and participated in CAYC’s Arte de Sistemas I (July 1971) in which
Romero also participated.
Conceptual art practices disturb the reading and viewing regimes that
contain meaning and assign value. They bring buried power structures
to the surface, whether these concern institutional legitimation, aesthetic
perception or social violence. Their use of language furnishes their
endeavour with a particular criticality and sociability. It seeks to disable
the ideological divides between the expert critic, the artist as producer
and the viewer as consumer, and opens the work to both its context and
social reality. In this chapter, we will examine how juxtaposition opens
the space of art as a social space by exploring the work’s logico-semantic

relations.
A logico-semantic analysis offers a way of understanding how an artwork
communicates independently of its evaluation as (good) art. By considering
the logico-semantic relations in different material and discursive contexts
we can also test the applicability of this method of analysis. As previously
mentioned, interpretation cannot be fully demarcated from evaluation
since they are both part of the same semiotic fabric where the choice of
what is worth analysing is formulated on the basis of what has already been
understood. For this reason, it is important to understand the discursive
field that is generated by and around the work, and how the work manipu-
lates a plurality of voices in order to advance its critique.
4.2 Wittgenstein and Halliday

Wittgenstein rejected any vantage point outside language wherefrom an
intrinsic universal meaning could be drawn independently of its use. He
maintained that all philosophy, understood as an enquiry into the field
of knowledge, “is a ‘critique of language’” (Wittgenstein 2002 [1921],
4.0031). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus published in 1921
demonstrated that to investigate the nature of propositions is to understand
the relation of language to the world. Hence “The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world” and “I am my world. (The microcosm.)”
(Wittgenstein 2002 [1921], 5.6 and 5.6.3; original emphasis) Wittgenstein
attempted to find the general form of the proposition; that is, a proposi-
tion that could generate any proposition. This also meant to demonstrate
the limits of language since what could not be generated by this general
proposition would be nonsensical and outside the realm of language. As
Wittgenstein noted in the preface to Tractatus: “It will therefore only be in
language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the
limit will simply be nonsense” (2002 [1921], 3).
Roger White (2006) identifies three main propositions around which
Wittgenstein’s thesis pivots. First, to understand a proposition means to
know what is the case if the proposition is true and therefore one can under-
stand a proposition without knowing whether it is true (4.024). Second,
logical constants are not representatives (4.0312) and, third, sense is deter-
minate (3.23). Starting with the first, to understand a proposition means
116 E. KALYVA
to be able to infer a situation where that proposition can be possible; and

inferring that propositions are true or false requires that they are measured
against something. For Wittgenstein, that is the world. As the opening
lines of Tractatus read: “The world is all that is the case” (1) and “The
world is the totality of facts, not things” (1.1). This attention to facts, not
things, underlines the focal point of the enquiry: how things are arranged
in language and in the world and how these two systems correlate. That is
to say, it is not a matter of existence (of utterances, of things) but of exis-
tence in a state of affairs.
The opposite is also true: understanding a proposition without having
verified its truth-function (for example, “It is raining in Chicago”) requires
a system of language that generates propositions. Based on this system, a
proposition must carry those logical structures and rules that make it com-
municable independently of the facts by which it is evaluated as being true or
false. This means that interpretation is distinct from evaluation but that it still
requires projection beyond the language system. In other words, the prem-
ise is that there is correspondence between a situation and a proposition.
Wittgenstein called this schematic correspondence—the most basic form of
representation—“picture” [Bild]. Language, therefore, can be analysed as a
system of significant [sinnvoll] propositions that yield a schematic representa-
tion or picture [Bild] of the relation between words and facts: “A proposition
is a picture of reality: for if I understand a proposition, I know the situation
that it represents” (4.021). Thus propositions stand in for something and
convey the rules of their engagement. Wittgenstein used different words
to describe the relation of a picture to the world: darstellen [to represent],
abbilden [to depict] and vertreten [to stand in for]. Accordingly, a picture
represents the situation that would make it true, it depicts that reality and
the elements in the proposition stand in for the objects in the represented
situation (White 2006, 50; 72). Finally, both the situation and the proposi-
tion must possess the same “logical (mathematical) multiplicity” (4.04). This
means that there must be equivalence between the parts of the one set and
the parts of the other set.
Wittgenstein’s second main proposition concerns logical constants
and maintains that words such as “and” and “or” are not represented in
the world but are functions of language. In this way, Wittgenstein could
solve the logical problem that arises in the typical example “Mary is in
the kitchen or in the living room” by breaking the proposition into two
elementary ones, each having a truth-function: “Mary is in the kitchen”
and “Mary is in the living room”. Thus logical constants pose no problem
to the inference of a general form of proposition that can cover all cases.
On the contrary, a proposition of logic—a proposition that contains the
requirements that allow one to decide whether it is true or false without
having to measure it against the world—can only be a tautology. Being
unconditionally true, tautologies are like contradictions: they show that
they say nothing and lack sense (4.461). The typical example of a tautol-
ogy is to say “We will leave when we leave”. Finally, regarding the third
pivotal point of Tractatus that sense is determinate, Wittgenstein main-
tained that sense is pre-agreed [bestimmt]. This means that the case at
hand must already be known to the speakers and the rules of engagement
must follow certain conventions (this premise becomes central in speech
act theory as discussed in Chapter 3). To summarise so far, the fundamen-
tal propositions of Tractatus are that things (the world, our world) are set
in a state of affairs and talking about these things sets them in a state of
affairs thus understood.
While seeking to break down language into its basic form, Wittgenstein
saw that elementary propositions are hardly used in reality; rather, under-
standing everyday language depends on enormously complicated tacit
conventions (4.002). Remaining true to the rigorous method of analysis
that it proposes, the penultimate proposition of Tractatus is that anyone
who understands its author and uses his propositions will see that they are
nonsensical, yet a step towards seeing the world aright (6.54). (The last
proposition is “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (7).)
About 30 years later, Wittgenstein suggested that the nature of the relation
of language to the world could be understood by drawing a parallel to
games. Using this as a functional metaphor, his Philosophical Investigations
(1953) argued that things relate to one another and to the world in many
different ways, and that their correspondingly formulated concepts are made
to “fit” the rules of their use—like, for example, a pawn in a game of chess
(Wittgenstein 1953, §65; §136). One must therefore consider—or better,
one can only consider—language in use and in the case at hand. Yet this is not
always easy. As Wittgenstein explains:
One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn
from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the
way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice. (1953, §340; original emphasis)
We can understand this “prejudice” as referring to the resistance within phil-

osophical circles to abandon the idea of the universality of meaning and the
118 E. KALYVA
truth condition of language, which also serves as its moral condition. But
there is more than that. Wittgenstein argues that for one to be able to confer
rules for the precise and complete definition of language, one requires a clear
view of the use of one’s words, which is something that language users do
not command (1953, §122). As a result, Wittgenstein notes that: “We predi-
cate of the thing that lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the
possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the
highest generality” (1953, §104). This is another important self-reflective
junction in Wittgenstein’s thought. It underlines how mediation, shaped by
the tools that we can command, takes precedence over the object of enquiry,
which not only remains elusive but also becomes shrouded in discourse. In
other words, one must be wary of how the process of analysis itself shapes
the object in question.
In recent years, two major approaches to the analysis of language use have
developed: conversational analysis, which examines the process of commu-
nication at the time of the event,1 and discourse analysis, which considers
the overall products of discourse as a social practice. Discourse analysis
can be applied on different uses and formats of language (for example,
oral, written or multimodal) and expands into the field of cultural stud-
ies. Building on the influential work of Halliday, it draws resources from
Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bahktin, V.N. Vološinov and the Prague School
as well as Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Marxism and critical theory
(Adorno and Horckheimer). With particular emphasis on the social and
political dimension of language, critical discourse analysis studies the rela-
tions between language, power and ideology and the role of discourse in
the (re)production and challenge of dominance in society (van Dijk 1993).
Discourse analysis rejects the simple code model of one-to-one cor-
respondence according to which the speaker communicates meaning to
the hearer as a wholly shaped and unintermitted bundle of information to
be precisely interpreted as such. Instead, it considers communication as a
dynamic process that develops between interlocutors. Moreover, discourse
is understood as a communicative event whereby conversational partici-
pants are doing something else beyond only using language: they interact.
To analyse this, therefore, one must consider how the text, in the extended
sense of the word, is produced in the process of communication, how
meaning is determined and what is accomplished by this act. Put differently,
1
H.P. Grice (1989) suggested the concept of conversational implicature and how conver-
sational participants observe the cooperation principle and the maxims of quality, quantity,
relation and manner. Conversational implicature diverges from Austin’s illocutionary force
and constitutes a new class of non-truth inference.
language is understood as a joint action fundamentally used for social

purposes, and its function is both transactional and interactional. For these
reasons, language use must be treated as social interaction based on shared
beliefs and social conventions, and be considered with regards to different
types of context, co-text (what has been previously said and what follows)
and the assumptions made by the participants apart from cohesion and
coherence (Clark 1996; Stubbs 1983).
Halliday asks: “How else can one look at language except in a social
context?” (1978, 10; original emphasis) Language is a semiotic system—
that is, a system of information—which carries the register of the situation
within which it operates. Register is understood here as the configuration
of semantic resources that the language user as a member of a culture
typically associates with a situation type. At its core, this position is not
different from Wittgenstein’s request for correspondence between a prop-
osition and the representation of the reality which it conveys. Halliday
(1978) further maintains that language is a social semiotic system, a prod-
uct of the social process with two fundamental aspects: expression and
action (the latter being the interpersonal component). Language should
therefore be interpreted with reference to its place in the social process
and the type and aim of the situation within which it operates. For their
part, contexts are not devoid of social value but are themselves social con-
structs. Based on this, the text is understood as an instance of linguistic
interaction in the socio-semiotic process of language in operation. Given
that the reader is presented with the possibility of selection from a range of
semantic choices, a text becomes meaningful and communicates because
there is knowledge of the linguistic system that is used and, moreover,
because that system is used within particular shared contexts (cultural,
situational, verbal etc.). As Halliday explains, “A text is a process of shar-
ing; the shared creation of meaning” (1994, 75).
With a focus on how meaning is realised in language use, Halliday (2014
[1985]) developed his systemic functional grammar in close relation to
context and demonstrated how meaning is organised according to three
metafunctions of language: the ideational, which relates to the context’s field
(what is being talked about) and refers to the resources that a language offers
for expression and how these are selected and combined; the interpersonal,
which relates to the context’s tenor (the relations and roles of those involved)
and refers to how languages enact social relations; and the textual, which
relates to the context’s mode (the format of communication) and refers to
how a language enables the flow of discourse and coherent communication.
In terms of relations between clauses within a linguistic structure, Halliday
120 E. KALYVA
defined the case of parataxis (the coordination of independent clauses),

hypotaxis (the combination of an independent and a dependent clause) and
logico-sematic relations where one clause describes the other in specific ways.
The latter has two categories: projection and expansion. Projection describes
the statement in language use via quoting or reporting, often by the use of
quotation marks. Expansion concerns the contents of the clauses. It includes
elaboration, where the one clause explains the other more precisely by using
conjunctive expressions such as “in other words”, “I mean”, “that is” and so
forth; extension, where there is addition of new information by the use of
expressions such as “and”, “or” and “but”; and enhancement that describes
a spatial, temporal or causal-conditional conjunction or manner and is intro-
duced by clauses such as “because”, “if” and so forth. An example of tempo-
ral enhancement is “Mary visits whenever she can”.
To conclude, discourses produce texts (and, we can add, images) that
exist not only by what is said but, perhaps most importantly, by what is
left unsaid. Language is actualised within given social situations and com-
municates information that is dependent upon and therefore also informs
us about those situations, the patterns of thinking behaviour and habit-
ual thought (Halliday 2002). As such, language serves as the vehicle of
reality, which is itself another social construct. Halliday converges with
Wittgenstein in the understanding of how language shapes what we per-
ceive to be the world we live in. For language realises a world and, in
particular, our social world:
as language becomes a metaphor of reality, so by the same process reality

becomes a metaphor of language. Since reality is a social construct, it can
be constructed only through an exchange of meanings. Hence meanings are
seen as constructive of reality. (Halliday 1978, 191)
Based on Wittgenstein’s and Halliday’s insights on how language shapes

both our understanding and our world, and how social structures, roles
and behaviours frame the context of communication, the following analy-
sis will demonstrate how artistic communication is part of a social semi-
otic system. It will examine the logico-semantic relations of conceptual
artworks that juxtapose what one reads with what one sees by considering
their propositional, linguistic content and the relation between their textual
and visual components; and will show how they can challenge the power
structures which guide both their meaning and their realisation.
4.3 The Horror of the Gallery‐Goer: Keith

Arnatt’s Trouser‐Word Piece (1972)
One of the most recognised images of new artistic production in Britain in
the early 1970s, defined as “conceptual”, is the photographic detail from
Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece (1972). Associated with the exhibition The New
Art (1972, Hayward Gallery), this photograph was circulated by the press as
the arrogant face of this new art and the authoritarian yet arbitrary claims of
its artists. Its caption in Time Out’s review of the show read: “Keith Arnatt
winning friends and influencing people at the Hayward’s ‘The New Art’”
(Time Out 1972). In the analysis of visual culture, the juxtaposition of images
and texts has particular importance. Conceptual art practices advanced strate-
gies of juxtaposition and transposition of signs and meanings across artistic
and non-artistic sites, creating an aporia of meaning. By bringing together
different modes of communication, this implicated the status of the object of
art as well as the respective systems of interpretation and evaluation that oper-
ate within the wider social sphere. In order to understand the controversy of
this image and what was “new” that this new art had to offer, we must look at
how Arnatt’s work functions in context and what the proposition “I’m a real
artist” means, or can mean, in the time and place of its display.
Together with When Attitudes Become Form (1969, ICA) and Seven
Exhibitions (1972, The Tate), the exhibition The New Art (17 August–24
September 1972) is considered one of the major exhibitions of conceptual
art in the UK. It was supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain and
was intended as the first of a series of biennials designed to map contem-
porary art production. The selection of works was made by Anne Seymour,
assistant keeper of the Tate. The organisers considered different titles such
as “Hayward Biennial”, “Art in Britain 1970–1972”, which some deemed
to be “chauvinistic”, and “Magic and Strong Medicine” that was rejected
for being “seriously misleading” (TNA Archives, file 1). While the exhibi-
tion was envisaged to include artists from different age groups, it ended
up focusing on younger artists working with mixed media. Responding to
the Arts Council’s reservations that presenting only conceptual art would
stir criticism, Seymour argued that most recent art production was not
compatible with other art (TNA Archives, file 1). The participating artists
were Arnatt, Art & Language, Michael Craig-Martin, David Dye, Barry
Flanagan, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, John Hilliard, Richard Long,
Keith Milow, Gerald Newman, John Stezaker and David Tremlett.
122 E. KALYVA
The exhibition catalogue of The New Art was also novel by the standards
of British public galleries, but in a different way to the Tate’s Seven Exhibitions
as previously discussed. The catalogue was divided into two sections, one
presenting the participating artists and the works on display, and the other
one offering the space to its artists. A strong interest in language use and phi-
losophy as well as the dialogue and exchanges between artists emerge from
its pages. The catalogue included Burgin’s analysis of the institutional frame-
work of art with reference to Wittgenstein and French structuralism, Art &
Language’s reflections on Index 02 (1972) with reference to Morris Weitz,
and Stezaker’s discussion of the relation between art and theory from a tradi-
tional and an analytical perspective. The exhibition also included a bookstand
with relevant exhibition catalogues, artists’ books and other publications.
For his section in the exhibition catalogue, Arnatt included a repro-
duction of Trouser-Word Piece and excerpts from his work Art and
Egocentricity—A Perlocutionary Act? (1971) previously presented at Seven
Exhibitions. The latter consisted of a text on language use and an instal-
lation view of the proposition “Keith Arnatt is an artist” written on the
wall. The relation between Seven Exhibitions and The New Art was dis-
cussed in Chapter 3. An additional point of conjunction was Arnatt’s An
Institutional Fact (1972) on display at the Hayward. This work is similar
to his Tate Work (1972), which comprised a series of portraits of the gal-
lery’s workers. But whereas the Tate piece displayed the gallery staff from
director to attendants, the Hayward version only presented portraits of
the latter. For the Tate piece, Arnatt had produced an apology for any
embarrassment that it might had caused (Tate Archives TG 92/242/1).
Likewise at the Hayward, there were those who found the work patronis-
ing and insulting, and complained that the people in the photographs
became uniform and lost their privacy (Overy 1972; Mrs Thompson, let-
ter to Norbert Lynton, 22 September 1972, TNA Archives, file 2). The
staff union was also involved and their representative proposed that, while
happy to be photographed, the attendants should be paid a suggested fee
of £3 (Mr C. Ward, letter to Nicolas Serota [n.d.], TNA Archives, file 1).
The press release of The New Art argued that the title was intentionally
questionable and that the show’s contents challenged the time-honoured
notion of art being primarily concerned with beauty. Admitting that the
exhibition might not be what people expected, it asked: “But should art be
what people expect?” (TNA Archives, file 2) According to Seymour (1972),
the exhibition aimed at capturing the latest national developments in art,
even though these were more gradual in comparison to other European or
American cities; and at presenting the development of ideas and how these
change and expand. In Britain, it was not until the mid 1960s and the activi-
ties of the Independent Group that the element of the “new” became part
of the answer to the influence of American abstract expressionism (Massey
1995). Even by the early 1960s, artistic production was seen as having a
somewhat mediatory position between an internationally projected American
modernism, on the one hand, and distinct European avant-garde movements,
on the other (Serota 2009).
Let us consider the context of the exhibition more closely. The Arts
Council opened the Hayward Gallery in 1968 as its dedicated exhibition
space thus ending its collaboration with the Tate, and supported the expan-
sion of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). The activities of the ICA
become particularly important in establishing new art in Britain. Its opening
show, The Obsessive Image 1960–1968 (10 April–29 May 1968), presented
an array of artistic developments across different media including television
and advertisement. In 1969, the Institute gathered works already character-
ised as “conceptual”, “earth” and “kinetic” art in its version of the seminal
exhibition of the “new”: When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-
Situations-Information (28 September–7 October 1969), previously shown
at Bern. In typical corporate speak, the sponsors of the show, the tobacco
company Philip Morris Europe, explained that this “new art” had its coun-
terpart in the business world: both art and business, it claimed, were char-
acterised by innovation, without which progress would be impossible in any
segment of society (WBF 1969, n.p.). For Harald Szeemann, director of
the Kunsthalle Bern and curator of the exhibition, participating artists such
as Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Jannis Kounellis, Lawrence Weiner and
Mel Bochner aspired to freedom from the object and articulated form as it
emerged from within the experience of artistic process itself (WBF 1969,
n.p.). When Attitudes Become Form marked another defining trait for this
new, conceptual art: that to be included in the exhibition catalogue counted
as participating in the show—one did not need to display anything in the
gallery room. In terms of reception, reviews of the iteration at the ICA might
have overlooked the information regarding the show’s finance, but certainly
noted the “scruffiness of appearance” and the “search of informality” of the
exhibits, which were understood as making:
an understandable gesture of defiance against the idea of art as an activ-

ity producing objects of commercial value [. . .]. This line of thought
runs close to other criticisms of the capitalist system and ends up in two
124 E. KALYVA
results—deliberately non-buyable, non-collectible works […] and the use of

notably unprecious materials. (Gosling 1969)
Three years later, the Hayward’s The New Art attracted over 13,000 visi-
tors, a total income of over £4,000 and various shades of public disapproval.
For many, the artworks on display were neither “art” nor “new”. Letters
to the organisers questioned the fairness of the selection process, the Arts
Council’s policy and even the fate of the Hayward Gallery. They argued that
the exhibits were neither paintings nor sculptures and did not belong in a
public art gallery, let alone at tax-payers’ expense (TNA Archives). At the
opposite end of the spectrum, the Artists Union had placed a stall outside
the gallery, protesting against the Council’s refusal to offer them a space in
the foyer of the building. In a letter to Robin Campbell, director of Fine
Arts at the Arts Council, the chair of the Union had requested a table stand
in order to recruit members and “above all to monitor the show itself, which
[they] felt is extremely relevant to [their] concern with the social and aes-
thetic structure of art production” (25 July 1972, TNA Archives, file 2).
Reviews of the show noted that the exhibits had already been seen at
other London galleries such as Situation, Rowan, Lisson, the Tate and the
Whitechapel Gallery, as well as in Germany and the US (Time Out 1972;
Vaizey 1972). For some, one could not even distinguish between what
were characterised as the absurd and sad little gestures of the presented
“artists” (Mullaly 1972; original quotation marks). For others, the artists
were “more likely to be informed by Wittgenstein and Levi-Strauss rather
than Monet and Manet, more concerned with linguistics and structuralism
than with colour theories or social evils or with dreams of past and future”
(Gosling 1972). Regarding Art & Language’s Index 02 (1972), reviews
claimed that it failed to reach out to the public and since the visual played
a very small part in it, it seemed that the work was hardly relevant (Overy
1972). As for originality or imagination, one review complained that:
The (sic!) artists, apparently blinded to the truth by high degree of literacy,
or perhaps we should say verbal unintelligibility, have talked themselves into
presenting a number of simple physical facts as “new”, when even the most
casual glance into any physics’ text-book would reveal then to be age-old.
(London art scene 1972)
The only attempt to save the day, reports seemed to agree, was Gilbert &
George’s Shrubberies (1972)—a work consisting of two drawings presented
as sculptures and which was perhaps less boastful than their The Singing
Sculpture (1969), for which they had used their own bodies. The recep-
tion of The New Art articulates the competing interests and the compet-
ing factions forming around conceptual art, a “new” and critical art that
wanted to displace the “old” and traditional. However, one should also
keep in mind the function of the press. On one level, there is the differ-
ence between what commercial galleries or galleries abroad can do, and what
publically funded bodies are expected to do—a debate that takes a different
direction in the highly privatised culture of the US where the focus shifts to
exposing the corporate interests prevailing in the artworld. On another level,
journalistic discourse purports to report the public sentiment that it in turn
shapes, while at the same time it produces and preserves its own authority
as a harbinger of news. But conceptual art had its allies. In her review for
Studio International, Rosetta Brooks—who had organised the concurrent
exhibition A Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain (12–30 September 1972,
Gallery House London)—discussed the approaches that different works on
show had to the function of art: Arnatt’s “rationalist” approach, Gilbert &
George’s “normal” approach, Art & Language’s logico/linguistic approach,
and the social and political aspects of art as negotiated by the works of
Steve Willats and Victor Burgin (1972; original quotation marks). In Studio
International’s next issue, Rudi Fuchs (1972), later director of the Stedelijk
Museum Amsterdam and organiser of the touring exhibition Languages: An
Exhibition of Artists using Word and Image (1979) for the Arts Council of
Great Britain, argued that while these new artworks might appear private,
they nonetheless operate within a language system. This opens them up and
invites interaction.
4.3.1 Metaphors and Power Structures

Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece combines a photograph and a text, each in indi-
vidual frames of the same size (100.5 × 100.5 cm).2 The photograph is a
black and white full-body portrait of a man holding a sandwich board that
reads “I’m a real artist”. The text, an excerpt from John Austin’s Sense and
Sensibilia (1962), discusses how understanding the word “real” entails a
process of exclusion particular to the specific application of the word and
its opposite. In order to understand how this work communicates and what
Image preview at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/arnatt-trouser-word-piece-t07649.
2
126 E. KALYVA
meaning it creates, the analysis of its logico-semantic relations will begin with
a logical analysis of the textual proposition of the work and consider how it
relates to context. At a second stage, it will examine how the work’s textual
and visual components interrelate in the structuration of meaning and how
they engage with their gallery display and with the world. We should bear
in mind here that “context” acts as a category, a field of spatio-temporal
information, conditions, situations and particular attitudes.
Recalling Wittgenstein, propositions exist in a state of affairs and
yield a schematic representation of the relation between words and facts.
Elementary propositions are answerable to the world and constitute com-
plex propositions through a logical apparatus which is truth-functional.
Moreover, logical constants are not representatives and sense is determi-
nate and shaped by conventions and appropriate rules of engagement. As
Wittgenstein emphasises, “only in the nexus of a proposition does a name
have meaning” (2002 [1921], 3.3). In the case of Arnatt’s Trouser-Word
Piece, this nexus is institutional.
In the photographic part of the work, we read: “I’m a real artist”. In
the process of communication, a necessary condition for understanding
an utterance is contextual knowledge of grammar and vocabulary—that
is, knowledge of how the constituent parts of a sentence interrelate and
how they relate to the world. Before commencing the analysis of the
proposition “I’m a real artist”, let us avoid, momentarily, marked words
such as “real” and “artist” and their associated traditions of a privileged
artistic subjectivity and the artistic genius. Instead, let us consider the
structure “X is Y” in a more simple form such as “Sam is a brother”.
This proposition could mean that “Sam has two parents who have at
least one child other than Sam and Sam is related to that child as being
his or her brother”.
Real language users rarely use such simple, elementary propositions in
an effort to maximise the efficiency of communication. Instead, they rely
upon the assumption that there are certain underlying and shared condi-
tions that make a particular meaning possible and they behave accord-
ingly, expecting that their utterances will be judged as true or false with
reference to those conditions. If one is to contest the validity of the above
proposition and reply that “No, Sam is not a brother”, one could either
mean that (a) “No, Sam’s parents do not have any other offspring” or
(b) “No, Sam’s parents do have children but they are all female”. On the
other hand, if by saying “Sam is a brother” the speaker intended to actu-
ally say “Sam is a brother from the ’hood” and one tried to verify the truth
of the proposition by investigating Sam’s family condition, then interpre-

tation has missed the point.
In other words, meaning not only depends on the situation at hand and
context, but also on the form of the proposition (mode, tenor) and the
intention of the speaker (Halliday 1978). The examination of the logico-
semantic relations makes a crucial methodological distinction between
understanding the conditions of communication within a language system
and evaluating whether a proposition is plausible, true or convincing. This
becomes particularly important in the discussion of artworks where the
aesthetic functions both as a mode of communication and of evaluation.
Returning to Arnatt’s proposition “I’m a real artist”, I suggest break-
ing this complex statement into two simpler ones, of which the first will
propose the relation of the object to the world and the second will qualify
that relation. This will form the conjunction:
(I am an artist) (real) . (I am a real artist)
The first proposition, “I am an artist”, can be written as:
(Ex)Ix & (∀x)(∀y)(Ix&Iy → x = y) & (∀x)(Ix → Ax)
This reads that there is an “I” that is only one (thus everything else quali-
fied as “I” is identical to itself) and for every x instance of that “I” that
“I” is “an artist”. Alternatively, the “I” can be taken as a proper name, as
in the example of “Sam”, in which case the logical representation of the
proposition would be A(I).3 Yet in the case at hand, a picture of someone
holding a sandwich board reading “I’m a real artist”, the subject of the
utterance is not well established or is only tentatively established. This is
the starting point of the work’s critical engagement with its context, and
of its analysis.
The necessary conditions that allow one to decide whether the above
statement is true or false are that an “I” must exist and that “artist”
must be such a characteristic that can be attributed to that “I”. Had this
statement been presented in a less compact form, for example “I, Keith
Arnatt, the real person whose work is exhibited in an art gallery where
artists exhibit their works can be classified as the commonly understood
3
My thanks to Roger White for the indication.
128 E. KALYVA
artist—that is, a person who exhibits his works in an art gallery”, analysis
would have been redundant.
If we consider Arnatt’s proposition from a semantic, extra-linguistic
point of view, it is presented in a photograph in an art context. This con-
text becomes the measure of the proposition “I am an artist” wherein it
communicates based on certain conditions. In order to understand how
meaning-making develops, we must identify these conditions. I will s pecify
the conditions of relevance and symmetry as two such main conditions
(other conditions are, for instance, to be able to see and read the work).
The condition of relevance is observed when one relates the immedi-
ately viewed object to a subject known from that object’s contextual vicin-
ity. This can be spatio-temporal or referential. For example, one would
relate a numbered tag on a pair of boots found in a shoe shop to their
equivalent price. In the case of Arnatt’s proposition, one understands the
“I” to relate to a person called “Keith Arnatt” either because one recog-
nises him in the picture or because one recognises him as the author of the
work (the latter can be achieved, for example, by reading the caption to
the image that refers to the real person, Keith Arnatt).
Symmetry, or symmetrical transposition, defines a state of affairs where
a quality from one object is transposed to another object from within the
same context. It is a relation, in other words, between a qualifying con-
text and its contents. To return to the previous example, items on sale in a
shoe shop would be generally considered to be shoes (or pertaining to the
category of “shoes”). In Arnatt’s case, the artworld is a particularly mutable
environment. While it is characterised by shifting financial and ideologi-
cal interests, the following logical association is nevertheless generally valid:
“If this art gallery is a place of art exhibitions where artists exhibit their
work and Keith Arnatt participates in this exhibition then he is an artist”.
Combining the conditions of relevance and symmetry, it becomes reason-
able to assume that the proposition “I am an artist” refers to the maker of
the work, Keith Arnatt, who is an artist because he participates in an art
exhibition such as The New Art.
The second component of the compound proposition “I’m a real artist”
is the word “real”. Following the proposed methodology, the word “real”
is to qualify the relation of the proposition “I am an artist” to the world.
To do so, it must yield a logico-semantic rule for at least one of the condi-
tions of relevance or symmetry determining that proposition’s relation to
the world. In the case of relevance, the “real” qualifies “Keith Arnatt” to
whom the “I” of the first clause refers as a real person. This means that
Arnatt is a real artist because he is a real person. In the case of symmetry,
the “real” qualifies the word “artist” based on the logical association that
“Arnatt is a real artist because real artists exhibit their works in an art gal-
lery, Arnatt exhibits works in an art gallery and the works exhibited in an
art gallery are done by artists”. In the linguistic structure “I’m a real artist”
the word “real” has closer proximity to the word “artist” and therefore
becomes a stronger qualifier for it; but since after Wittgenstein logical con-
stants such as “and” and “or” are not representatives, both qualifications
are valid. Most importantly, they are both answerable to the world.
At this point, one might be tempted to refer to logical consequence
after the example “Kermit is a frog, all frogs are green therefore it follows
that Kermit is green”. However, the relation between artists and galleries
is not so straightforward. This is precisely what Arnatt’s work interrogates:
that this relation is not based on a truth-function but is particularly condi-
tioned and mantained. Indeed, the word “real” is not any type of qualifier.
It is also used as an evaluative, for example “This is a real steak”. By exam-
ining the work’s logico-semantic relations in its art context, therefore, we
can understand how it invites questions such as: What is, or who is, the
qualifier for art? Am I an artist if I say so or am I an artist only if I exhibit
my works in a gallery? Is exhibiting works in an art gallery the only way
to become an artist? By generating these questions in the process of com-
munication, Trouser-Word Piece brings into focus how “gallery” becomes
the site of qualification for art and “exhibit” the mode.
Moving to the second stage of analysis, the image of Arnatt holding a
sign that reads “I’m a real artist” does not stand alone. It is accompanied
by a framed excerpt from Austin’s discussion of the word “real”. Austin
discusses the process of affirmation and notes that saying what something
is also entails understanding of that which it is not. This means that affir-
mation entails comparison and knowledge of the relevant state of at least
two things. When one says “Object A is not object B”, it means that one is
in a position to argue about the state of both objects A and B. In the case
of the word “real”, Austin continues, it communicates on the conditions
that, first, one must know by contrast that which is not “real” and, second,
one must know what the speaker intends to say by the specific application
of the word “real”. This is a central premise in the analysis of meaning-
making as demonstrated by the example “Sam is a brother”: in order to
understand what the speaker is talking about one must know, or at least
have some knowledge of, what the speaker talks about. In addition, Austin
argues that in the case of “real” it is the negative use of the word that
wears the trousers so to speak—which is to say, it is the non-real that has
the lead in the process of recognition and identification.
130 E. KALYVA
Arnatt’s image engages Austin’s text standing next to it in a complex

way not readily accessible via the taxonomy of image-text relations based on
expansion and projection. However, we can understand the structuration
of meaning at different levels by making a synthesis of the above analysis
of Arnatt’s proposition, and by further considering the work’s structural
and procedural aspects in terms of how its viewing and reading develops.
Trouser-Word Piece draws attention to different types of frames that enclose
it and which are visually and conceptually interrelated. There is a written
proposition inside a picture of the artist. This picture is located next to a
text whose layout is typical for signs or, given the context of art exhibitions,
explanatory notes that usually accompany works of art. The contents of that
text, which is also framed, derive from an extra-artistic context (philosophy).
Even so, they are reiterated in the first, inner frame that stands next to it
(the sandwich board regarding the “real artist”) and visually duplicated in
the second, outer frame next to it (the photographic frame of a man wear-
ing trousers). For its part, the work’s title arches over textual reiteration and
visual representation. As such, the work’s components may be individually
framed for its gallery display and by corresponding discourse, but they are
conceptually relevant—a relevance that the work supports both in terms of
its form and its contents (that is, both visually and discursively).
In this way, the work interrogates the limits of the common ground that
participants must share in order to understand both that which is and that
which is not. It recasts the discussion around recognition in the art gallery
context in terms of consensus, revealing how the “real” functions as a quali-
fier for Arnatt’s proposition as much as it does for his work and status. At
the same time, by presenting a photograph of a man wearing trousers in an
artwork, Trouser-Word Piece brings to the surface the social context from
which Austin’s metaphor “wears the trousers” is drawn. But it does not
simply duplicate this metaphor. A metaphor we should recall, is a linguis-
tic trope by which a quality of something is transferred to a parallel envi-
ronment—in this case, the correlation between masculinity and authority.
Rather, Arnatt’s work contextualises that quality as part of a culturally deter-
mined hierarchy and, further, inverts it: Is he a man with authority because
he is wearing trousers or a real artist because he exhibits his works in an art
gallery? (For Austin, it is the non-real that wears the trousers and leads the
process of recognition.) As such, the work opens up to the world and nego-
tiates its existence both in the art gallery and within the wider social context.
It confronts the viewer with a real object, a tentative understanding of its
opposite (a non-real object, a non-real artist) and social power structures.
As a final layer of engagement with social context, the photographic

portrait of the artist presents him wearing a sandwich board in order to
proclaim his proposition. This draws further attention to the relation
between the act of recognition and contextual status. Unlike Art and
Egocentricity—A Perlocutionary Act? where he wrote the statement “Keith
Arnatt is an artist” on the gallery wall, Trouser-Word Piece exceeds, even
contradicts, its gallery setting. The sandwich board that Arnatt wears to
declare his status as an artist at the same time declares something else. For
if one recognises Arnatt as an artist based on the conditions of relevance
and symmetry as discussed above, what prevents one from also recognis-
ing him as a street vendor since he is wearing a sandwich board? But is
he also that the same way he is also a man because he is wearing trousers?
By comparing himself to a street vendor who promotes and tries to sell
consumer goods, Arnatt portrays himself in such a way that validates the
work’s proclamation to be good enough as advertisement, but at the same
time remains prone to discussion about whether it is good enough as art.
Indeed, one may argue that understanding what the artist is saying does
not mean that one has to believe him or accept him as an artist (or his
work as art). But who has to believe it to be true in order for Arnatt to be a
real artist? Does it make a difference whether he believes it or whether we
recognise that the means employed to reach agreement is this utterance, in
which we have to recognise the intention of the artist as being true? And
if he is an artist, does this make this work, the means to convince that its
author is a real artist, art? Or is there a distinction between commercial
activity (in the streets) and the recognition of art (in the gallery)? As the
work generates these questions, it demonstrates that words and images
are not the only things which embody social norms—behaviours do too.
Understanding the frame means defining its contents. Arnatt had con-
sidered placing his photograph and Austin’s quote on the same page or
on the different sides of a postcard (letter to Barbara Reise, 4 December
1972, Tate Archives TGA 786/5/2/6). These formats would change the
nature of the relation between image and text and its critical potential.
As the case now stands, Trouser-Word Piece exists in a dynamic state of
recognition that is externally sustained, and whose rules of engagement
are critically mirrored and challenged by the work. The work frames itself
in a gallery space that is part of an institutional as well as a social context,
while at the same time it scrutinises its own framing by manipulating the
guise of a street vendor, a man and an artist. It juxtaposes the self-evident
with the self-proclaimed, and shifts attention not only between the object
132 E. KALYVA
in question and the subject of its making but also between the subject
of its viewing and the conditions of producing and displaying art. For if
Trouser-Word Piece really were “art”, it would not need to be assertive
of its otherwise universally communicable nature. And if it is not, or if it
needs to be externally and institutionally validated, then it cannot be art.
However, as the work still reminds the contemporary viewer, this is not
(only) a problem of art’s ontology but also of its classification and use.
In this way, Arnatt’s work successfully stages how provisional the obvi-
ous is, and opens up a space of negotiation and contradiction. The “real”
re-embeds the work in social context, while at the same time it becomes a
relevant notion polarised between those who potentially make a real selec-
tion of art (the artist? the art dealer? a public body?) and those who contest
this process, as Keith Arnatt proposes and as the viewer is encouraged to do.
It prompts one to question how it could be for an artist not to exhibit his
or her works in an art gallery, and how it could be for the gallery-goer not
to be a mere spectator who recognises things. It also demonstrates how the
work, any work, is subject to a hierarchical system of classification, recogni-
tion and evaluation that conditions the gallery as a space where visitors rec-
ognise and symmetrically transpose institutionalised power structures onto
exhibits as much as onto their own attitude towards them. This attitude,
like social behaviours and gender relations, is neither neutral nor natural but
maintained by shared beliefs, practices and force.
4.3.2 Dissemination and Afterlife
Arnatt considered Trouser-Word Piece to be one of the best examples of his
work at the time (letter to Barbara Reise, 4 December 1972, Tate Archives
TGA 786/5/2/6). In a historical context that predominantly advocated
aesthetic experience as a private and unmediated affair across the art col-
lector, the individual artist-genius and the bourgeois art-lover, one could
deem that to negotiate the supporting value systems of art by using lan-
guage was a passing fancy. In his essay A passing fancy?, Arnatt discusses his
work and the relations between what is said and the actions that support
it such as public and private goals, values, economic prejudices, social con-
ventions and, often, Arnatt remarks, “a passing fancy” (letter to Barbara
Reise, November 1972, Tate Archives TGA 786/5/2/6).
Trouser-Word Piece utilises features from different modes of significa-
tion such as the linguistic iteration of the negative and the visual affirma-
tion of presence, and combines them to convey but also to destabilise
contextual metaphors by both linguistic and pictorial means. Instead of

relying on a universal and unmediated aesthetic experience, it demon-
strates how its is defined by the conditions of relevance and symmetry, or
of recognition and agreement. As such, it draws to the surface the silent
assumptions in the process of conferring and sustaining value.
Experiencing art is a social activity as much as it is a discursive one—
which is to say, it is not irrelevant to the social, cultural, economic and
ideological state of affairs. Let us return to The New Art. Despite the reac-
tion of the press, Trouser-Word Piece was not on display but only appeared
in the exhibition catalogue; for the exhibition, Arnatt presented An
Institutional Fact (1972) consisting of portraits of the gallery attendants.
These two works create an interesting juxtaposition that further generates
reflection on what is conditional and what is a fact in an institutional set-
ting. It may be that what remain are the real and material conditions not
of the work but of work, of the job of the attendants to guard the gallery
exhibits. Such a division of labour is part of the institution’s self-validation
process. As for Trouser-Word Piece, when its photographic component is
isolated and circulated in art magazines, exhibition catalogues and the
press as the arrogant face of a new type of artist—the conceptual artist—its
self-critical engagement with its status, context and audience is suppressed
and what remains can be construed as a celebratory affirmation of both
the art-object and the artist.
In the same period, Arnatt explored the possibilities of institutional
critique by taking his iconic portrait to the streets. He appeared with the
sandwich board reading “I’m a real artist” in public places and outside
art institutions. This can be understood as another way of exceeding the
institutional and physical confinement of art within the gallery room and
shows more aptly the strengths of the work’s institutional critique and its
limits. Out in the streets, Arnatt’s proposition becomes more threatening.
It confronts the passer-by and reveals how institutional frameworks oper-
ate beyond the gallery walls; but it also demonstrates how to be on those
walls should not be the only concern of an artist. In retrospect and given
the celebrity status that many artists acquired, Arnatt argues that in his
early works he also addressed his colleagues in the conceptual art world
who “wanted to become famous and were becoming egocentric shits”
(quoted in Mellon 1998, 5).
One of the first cases of institutional recognition of conceptual art
in Britain, The New Art has been evaluated in terms of impact and eco-
nomic profit (Grethy 1984; Wood 1999). In 2002, Trouser-Word Piece
134 E. KALYVA
was acquired by the Tate, and has since entered different discursive and
historiographical narratives. For the Tate’s exhibition Self-Evident: The
Artist as the Subject 1969–2002 (2003), it was considered part of the rise
of the “cult of the celebrity” and of the development of an artistic tradi-
tion leading up to Tracy Emin (Horlock and Stout 2002). More recently,
the work’s pun on the notion of the “real” was affirmatively used in the
touring exhibition I’m A Real Photographer, Keith Arnatt Photographs
1974–2002 (2007), which presented the progressive interest in Arnatt’s
work towards photography. As David Hurn (2007) describes it, Arnatt
shifted his interest from conceptual art to photography and became a pho-
tography junky.
On the other hand, the Henry Moore Institute presented Box, Body,
Burial: The Sculptural Imagination of Keith Arnatt (2009). The exhi-
bition accentuated the sculptural dimension of Trouser-Word Piece and
Self-Burial (1969) and traced Arnatt’s explorations in three-dimensional
form in works that ranged from early geometrical sketches to photographs
of constructed “minimalist” boxes. According to its press release, the
exhibition revealed the sculptural imagination that had informed Arnatt’s
photographic conceptual practice from the mid 1960s onwards (Box,
Body, Burial 2009). From another perspective, the artist Savage devel-
oped the series I’m A Fraud (2010). Engaging with concepts of own-
ership but also relying on the discursive value that Arnatt’s reference
has in order to validate its claim, a portrait of a man with a sandwich
board reading “I’m a fraud” appeared on the cover of AN Magazine
(February 2011).
In the life of an artwork, not only the origin but also its possible
meanings shift. An analysis of the work’s logico-semantic relations can
determine how the work operates through mutable contexts and its reit-
erations, and locate its critical potential to interrogate its artistic as much
as its social context. Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece juxtaposes different
reading and viewing regimes and causes its own pictorial frame to fail
as a self-contained medium. Likewise, the portrait of the artist and his
proposition remain far from self-evident, and reading and viewing are
revealed to be conditional rather than based on a logical truth-function
or a universality of communication. Such critical operations across image
and text bring the institutional space of art into a dialogue with social
space or, better, expose concrete power structures that run across the
gallery space as a social space. For this reason, the work can endure its
relocation and reclassification and sustain its criticality as long as the
conditions of relevance and symmetry on which it operates remain the

same. That is, as long as the hierarchical structures that administer power
and value remain in place.
4.4 The Situation of Propositions: Victor

Burgin’s Room (1970)
Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday.
Victor Burgin, from the UK 76 (1976) series
Allan Kaprow (1993) maintained that John Cage’s 4'3" (1952) was not a
silent piece because during its performance the sounds of the elevator, the
street, squeaking chairs, coughing, giggling and yawning became deafening in
a space that was filled with the physical presence of the spectator. In collabo-
rating as much as in contrasting contexts and through a series of performative
gestures, photographic paradoxes and logical ambiguity, artistic practices can
negotiate not only the presence of the object but also the presence of the
spectator. The juxtaposition of different modes of signification and their cor-
responding value systems and norms of behaviour was one of the ways that
conceptual art sought to destabilise the mode of apprehension at the moment
of the event. In a historical period characterised by Cold War paranoia, the
celebration of art-objects over “committed art”, anti-imperialist struggle and
international political upheaval, the context of reading became paramount.
Victor Burgin’s works interrogate the relation between the viewing sub-
ject and the viewed object. He draws resources from Barthes, de Saussure,
Wittgenstein, Marx and Popper, and is interested in demonstrating how art,
essentially a social activity, is subjected to institutionalised norms and ideologi-
cal theorisations. His works particularly address how the object of art functions
as a carrier of ideological content and seek to underline the processes of art’s
commodification. Consider, for example, UK 76 (1976), a work that juxta-
poses languages and images from everyday life, consumerist culture and adver-
tisement campaigns. In his catalogue essay for the exhibition The New Art,
Margin note, Burgin (1972a) draws attention to the putative self-sufficiency
of the category of art that is attributed by institutions as being independent of
human activity and the processes of signification; here, art’s political potential
can be located in the ability of the artwork to draw attention to how social
institutions embody conceptual frameworks regarding the nature and function
of art, and regarding the roles of the artist and the spectator.
136 E. KALYVA
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Burgin developed a number of text-
based, propositional works that interrogated their context and drew attention
to the framing of their experience. At the time, these works were generally con-
sidered to be more comprehensive than those of Art & Language but more
obscure than Ian Breakwell’s; still, some insisted that they were something to
be read in one’s own time rather than having their “torturous and pretentious
prose” displayed on the gallery walls (Overy 1974). Burgin’s works from this
period include Room (1970), which was presented at the exhibitions Idea
Structures (1970, Camden Arts Centre) and The New Art (1972, Hayward
Gallery), and which was bought by the Tate in 1973. This Position (1969) was
also shown at The New Art and bought by the Arts Council of Great Britain
in 1974.4 All Criteria (1970) featured in the exhibition catalogues of Idea
Structures and The New Art, and Any Moment (1970) appeared in Studio
International’s July/August 1970 textual exhibition. These works together
with Period of Interruption (1970) were presented at the exhibition Art as
Idea from England (1971, CAYC), organised by Charles Harrison. Consisting
of sets of factual utterances, these works explore the possibility for a definitive
basis of meaning in the construction of experience and the relations between
the object, its experience and the world. As Burgin (1968) argues, one way of
countering the investment in the art-object as a stable entity is by an artistic
practice that is reciprocal and in constant dialogue with its surroundings.
The following discussion examines the logico-semantic relations of
Room. Room creates a situation by utilising logically structured propositions
in order to challenge the habitual modes of the apprehension of art and to
demonstrate the social context of semiosis. Contrary to the general valuation
of a “strong”, text-based conceptualism that was only interested in the idea
as if context were irrelevant, Room dialectically engages its context. In this
process, its formal presentation is important in guiding associated meaning
and experience. Specifically, this analysis will show how the work constitutes
its presence at the same time that it destabilises its reading and viewing, and
how it achieves this by superimposing different frames of reference.
Another way of understanding the importance of context—or, to recall
Derrida, how everything is part of the work’s (inter)textuality—is to con-
sider how the subject and the object of engagement are affected by reloca-
tion. In the case of Room, one such instance is its relocation from the gallery
wall to the printed page and another one is to a different socio-political
4
This Position is dated 1965 in the catalogue of the touring exhibition Art as Thought
Process: Works Bought for the Arts Council by Michael Compton, 1974. London: Arts Council
of Great Britain.
context—in this case, Buenos Aires during Alejandro Agustín Lanusse’s

military dictatorship. Such relocations are characteristic of conceptual art
practices that sought to expand beyond the gallery wall and of the interna-
tional networks that formed around them. In the case of Room, even if its
textual contents remain strictly speaking unaffected, context changes and
so does what one understands to be the work’s focal point and extensions.
To demonstrate the difference between using self-sustaining tautologi-
cal statements and employing tentative propositions that seek to disturb
their frames of reference—in other words, to demonstrate the critical use
of language in conceptual art—this section closes with a parallel discussion
of Kosuth’s essay Art after philosophy and Burgin’s Situational aesthetics.
Published in the same issue of Studio International in 1969, these texts
have different positions regarding the social and political dimensions of
art, and illustrate a historical as much as a contemporary debate on the
evaluation of conceptual art.
4.4.1 Defining a Place for Art

Created in 1965, the Camden Arts Centre quickly became an active venue
for exhibiting contemporary art. Its exhibition Environmental Reversal (26
June–27 July 1969) presented buried sounds of breathing, laughing and
applause by Arnatt, mirror installations by the Artist Placement Group and
nylon bubbles by the Eventstructure Research Group for which structures
were considered as possibilities or as events (Tate Archives TGA 747/6).
As the press noted, “What Alice dreamed and the Surrealists depicted is
given an environmental scale of illusion” (Brett 1969). For the same exhi-
bition, David Lamelas prepared his first film, A Study of the Relationships
between Inner and Outer Space (1969), which offered a spatial analysis of
the hierarchical structures that exist within the gallery building itself, the
gallery as an institution, its surrounding environment and the city. On
show during the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, the film asked people
about “the most important subject according to the mass media of infor-
mation”. In August of the same year, Hilliard explored the photographic
medium in his solo exhibition John Hilliard Recent Work (1969). It was
a multi-layered exhibition that, as its press release explained, consisted of
a “painting” (long blue bands painted on the floor and walls), a “sculp-
ture” (wooden bars across both surfaces) and their dialogical exchanges
in a room covered with newspapers and photographs of the artist’s earlier
hardware sculptures (Hilliard 1969).
138 E. KALYVA
Idea Structures (24 June–19 July 1970) was introduced as the first of
an annual survey of developments in contemporary art. It was organised
by Harrison, who was instrumental in setting up ICA’s When Attitudes
Become Form in 1969, and presented works by Arnatt, Burgin, Kosuth, Ed
Herring, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold
Hurrell.5 The exhibition occupied the Camden Arts Centre and the local
library at Swiss Cottage located within 15 minutes’ walking distance. As
most of the works were text-based, we can say that the exhibition also
took place in the exhibition catalogue, which was becoming a new site for
conceptual art.
Preceding the Tate’s Seven Exhibitions (1972) and the Hayward’s The
New Art (1972), Idea Structures advanced a contemporary interest in chal-
lenging the institutional context and the category of art through the use of
language. According to its press release, it was the first exhibition in England
to be entirely devoted to “post-object art”. It explored the possibility of
an art without specific physical form beyond “painting” and “sculpture”,
and raised questions regarding the processes on which one relies in order
to recognise something as art (FDU Archives; original quotation marks).
Two intertextual references are made here that weave together the fabric
of conceptual art’s international networks and its corresponding vocabu-
laries. The term “post-object” was used by Donald Karshan, director of
the NYCC, in his essay “The 1970s: Post-Object Art” for the exhibition
catalogue of Conceptual Art/Conceptual Aspects (1970, NYCC). Karshan,
with whom Harrison was in contact in preparation of the latter’s exhibi-
tion The British Avant-Garde (1971, NYCC), had asked to be credited for
coining the term (letter to Harrison, 23 June 1970, Tate Archives TGA
839/1/5/1). A few years later, the idea of going “beyond” painting and
sculpture reappears in the exhibition Beyond Painting and Sculpture: Works
Bought for the Arts Council by Richard Cork (1973, touring). These were
by Arnatt, Burgin, David Dye, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Hilliard,
Lamelas, Gerald Newman and Stezaker.
Back to Idea Structures, Harrison (2002, 223) notes in retrospect how
he “naively envisaged [the exhibition] as a representation of the hard-line
in conceptual art”. Exhibits included Kosuth’s filing box with mathemati-
cal puzzles; Atkinson, Baldwin, Bainbridge and Hurrell’s Lecher System
(1970), which negotiated how art is experienced and identified; and Hurrell’s
5
Atkinson, Bainbridge, Baldwin and Hurrell formed Art & Language in 1968 but were
individually named for this exhibition.
Ingot (1970), a collection of aluminium ingots on a plinth. Arnatt displayed

An Exhibition of the Duration of the Exhibition (1970), a digital clock count-
ing down the duration of the show in seconds, later to be reconstructed
for Tate’s Seven Exhibitions, while his Is it Possible for Me to Do Nothing as
my Contribution to this Exhibition? (1970) and A Specification for an Art
Condition (1970) appeared in the exhibition catalogue. Burgin displayed
Room and included All Criteria in the exhibition catalogue.
Reception of the show was polarised. For some, it was seen as one of
the first major manifestations of conceptual art, understood as an activity in
which “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work”, and
as marking a turning point in experiencing the whole space of the gallery
and one’s own existence in it (Field 1970; Carey 1970). Others complained
that the texts of the so-called “conceptual artists” needed too much time to
be read, had a dry intellectual tone taken to the lengths of pedantic obses-
sion and were dense with the jargon of linguistic analysis (Brett 1970a,
1970b; original quotation marks). If we recall the exhibitions discussed so
far and their reception, and keeping in mind the function of the press and
journalistic discourse, we can begin to understand the changing landscape
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a context shaped by galleries, critics
and the press and which significantly invested in the idea of the art-object as
an object of aesthetic and disinterested contemplation, conceptual art prac-
tices advanced a new type of art that interrogated its material, institutional
and ideological frameworks. While such works made definitive statements
about the nature of art and the function of discourse, this “new” art and
its use of language will become, by the end of the decade, embalmed by
institutional discourse and a rising market (see Chapter 5).
4.4.2 Context and Experience
Burgin’s Room exclusively occupied the largest room in the Camden Arts
Centre. It consisted of a series of 18 propositions typed on paper and pasted
at equal intervals on the walls of an otherwise empty room. As Harrison
recalls, “You came into the gallery and it just looked as if there was nothing
in there at all” (2011, 30). Burgin’s work has been considered as doing a
number of things. One retrospective consideration relates it to minimalism’s
perceptual enquiry into form and placement which was developed through
problem-solving challenges. This is a typical Greenbergian formulation of
artistic production and has discursive value within certain historiographical
narratives—mainly, that of modernism. For an art critic, to employ such
140 E. KALYVA
reiterations helps formulate preferred art histories; and for an artist, it helps
establish a context of reference and evaluation for his or her work. Burgin
completed his postgraduate studies at Yale (1965–67) “at the heyday of
minimalism” as he describes it. As part of this re-telling of the story of
his oeuvre, he explains that the two main problems he had to face were
how to place the object in a room following Robert Morris’s discussion on
sculpture, and how to respond to Donald Judd’s enquiry for a form that
was neither geometrical nor organic (Burgin 1982). In response, Burgin
argues how he conceptualised a type of artwork that did not consist of any
particular object but instead considered the architectural space as part of it
in order to engage the spectator and direct attention to his or her existence,
movements and experiences within that space.
Another way of approaching Room is with an interest—contemporary
to the work and central in conceptual art—in how art communicates from
within discursive and institutional frameworks, and how meaning and experi-
ence are mediated. In the pages of Art-Language and Studio International,
Burgin discusses his ideas about the nature and use of language—cf. In reply,
2(2) (Summer 1972) and Rules of thumb, 181(934) (May 1971) respec-
tively. The latter was also reproduced in the exhibition catalogue of The British
Avant-Garde where it can be read in conjunction with Art & Language’s
De legibus naturae. This text accompanied their Theory of Ethics, on dis-
play, and discussed the ethics of the production of artworks. In his interview
by Seymour for the exhibition catalogue of The New Art, Burgin (1972b)
refers to the different ways of understanding language including Austin’s
performative utterance, and explains how Room negotiates the contingency
of the object, the modes of observation and the chain of signification. In his
first book Work and Commentary (1973), a selection of text-based works
including This Position, All Criteria and Any Moment, Burgin argues that the
conception of a problem-solving linear tradition as defined by the American
modernist art discourse leads to causal determinism that, as a view on history,
coheres with essentialism (1973, n.p.). For his peers, too, Burgin’s work was
seen as interrogating the relationship between language and perception as
they are embedded in ideologies and social attitudes (Louw 1974).
The above illustrate the different narratives and overlapping interests
that guide our access to, as well as our understanding of, conceptual art.
There is a discursive field, in other words, through which analysis must
navigate while, at the same time, it tentatively reproduces that field. It is
important to address this plurality of voices for three reasons. First, it char-
acterises the historical context of conceptual art, caught between modern-
ism and the destabilisation of its protocols. Second, it is still active today and
further inflated by the market for conceptual art. Third, many conceptual
art practices manipulated plurality and defined certain criticial means by
which art can engage with context and discourse.
Room presents 18 interrelated factual propositions that define its exis-
tence and experience (Fig. 4.1). However, the work does not exclusively
operate on a referential level. Rather, the activity of reading the work
in combination with its formal presentation opens it up to context as a
framework for both the artwork and the spectator’s engagement with it.
Specifically, attention progressively extends from the object to the event
of observation, its structured situation and the systems of interpretation.
By examining the work’s logico-semantic relations and the processes of
language in operation, we can understand how the work structures its
body and experience but also how it frames social interaction beyond it.
Beginning with the work’s formal presentation, its propositions were indi-
vidually placed on little pieces of paper and arranged, in order, around the gal-
lery room. This allocation is reminiscent of captions to images that are now, as
objects, strikingly absent. In their austere black and white format, these papers
could be seen as captions or explanatory notes on which visitors typically rely
in order to gain some insight into the work of art “proper”. If this were the
case, they could be considered elaborations or extensions of an absent work;
here, however, they c onstitute it. Room not only offers no other image of itself
but what is more, the contents of its little papers, with their linguistic register
taken from analytic philosophy, is paradigmatically contrasted to their public
setting in an art gallery and to that which is there to be seen.
Examining the logico-semantic relations of its propositional contents,
Room interrelates linguistic and extra-linguistic components in a way that
creates a series of transgressions of the logical and perceptual order of
things. It operates on two fundamental propositions that indicate a total
space and a total time: proposition (1) “All substantial things which con-
stitute this room” and proposition (3) “The present moment and only
the present moment”. The relation between the work’s clauses could be
specified according to Halliday’s taxonomy of expansion (and specifically
spatio-temporal and conditional enhancement, extension and elaboration)
and projection (since some clauses refer to other clauses). Yet another
layer of analysis is required to be able to understand Room’s particular
type of image and text juxtaposition. Apart from the work’s visual pres-
ence, there is no other “image” given, but instead this is created by the
work’s juxtaposition with its context—a juxtaposition by which the work
structures and at the same time transgresses its own unity.
142 E. KALYVA
1
ALL SUBSTANTIAL THINGS WHICH CONSTITUTE THIS ROOM
2
ALL THE DURATION OF 1
3
THE PRESENT MOMENT AND ONLY THE PRESENT MOMENT
4
ALL APPEARANCES OF 1 DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED BY YOU AT 3
5
ALL OF YOUR RECOLLECTION AT 3 OF APPEARANCES OF 1 DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED BY YOU AT
ANY MOMENT PREVIOUS TO 3
6
ALL CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU MIGHT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEMBERS OF 5 AND MEMBERS OF 4
7
ALL OF YOUR RECOLLECTION AT 3 OTHER THAN 5
8
ALL BODILY ACTS PERFORMED BY YOU AT 3 WHICH YOU KNOW TO BE DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED
BY PERSONS OTHER THAN YOURSELF
9
ALL BODILY ACTS DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED BY YOU AT 3 PERFORMED BY PERSONS OTHER THAN YOURSELF
10
ALL MEMBERS OF 9 AND ALL MEMBERS OF 8 WHICH ARE DIRECTED TOWARDS MENMBERS OF 1
11
ALL OF YOUR BODILY ACTS AT 3 OTHER THAN 8
12
ALL OF YOUR BODILY SENSATIONS AT 3 WHICH YOU CONSIDER CONTINGENT UPON YOUR BODILY CONTACT
WITH ANY MEMBER OF 1
13
ALL OF YOUR BODILY SENSATIONS AT 3 WHICH YOU CONSIDER CONTINGENT UPON ANY EMOTION DIRECTLY
EXPERIENCED BY YOU
14
ALL CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU MIGHT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MENBERS OF 13 AND MEMBERS OF 12
15
ALL OF YOUR BODILY SENSATIONS AT 3 OTHER THAN 13 AND 12
16
ALL OF YOUR INFERENCES FROM 9 CONCERNING THE INNER EXPERIENCES OF ANY PERSON OTHER THAN
YOURSELF
17
ALL MEMBER OF 16 WHICH YOU CONSIDER IN WHOLE OR IN PART ANALOGOUS WITH ANY MEMBER OF 13
18
ANY MEMBER OF 16 WHICH YOU CONSIDER IN WHOLE OR IN PART ANALOGOUS WITH ANY MEMBER OF 12
Fig. 4.1 Victor Burgin, Room (1970) (© Victor Burgin)
Considering the work’s procedural aspect, the process of reading is guided

by the numerical ordering of the propositions and the instructions for their
combination. This further develops the work’s structural unity apart from
the fact that it was exclusively presented in one room (that is, the visual
apprehension of its unity in spatial terms). The work demands that the spec-
tator perform different logical operations such as combination, deduction
and set correlation of her observations, sensations, recollections and infer-
ences. Moreover, as reading unfolds and such observations and reflections
accumulate, the work turns attention to the criteria according to which these
instances can be spatio-temporally distinguished. At the same time, the work
requires physical movement and the viewer has to go around in order to
collect the snippets of text while she gathers and recollects her own experi-
ences.6 This adds another spatial and a temporal dimension to the concep-
tual order that is structured by the work’s factual propositions. However,
this dimension is subjective, created between the lines of text in the work as
they are read by the viewer and projected across the room that the viewer’s
body occupies. The work’s unity is structured both conceptually and physi-
cally within the gallery room, which frames its propositions. What is more,
this room becomes both the work’s subject and object; it is an interper-
sonal space of semiotic inscription of conceptual and physical enclosure. In
this way, the work compels the first transgression of the spatial order within
which it is materially placed.
Room’s indications do not end here, as if its own physical presence were
sufficient. Having advanced its own totalising space and time, the work pro-
ceeds with engaging the experiences of others. Consider proposition (8):
All bodily acts performed by you at 3 [The present moment and only the
present moment] which you know to be directly experienced by persons
other than yourself.
By way of a series of complex logical exercises in composition and exclu-

sion, Room stages the possibility of interpersonal communication and cre-
ates a public, shared space around it. In linguistic terms, signs operate
according to the principles of combination and differentiation to achieve
6
The present analysis discusses Room as it was displayed at Camden where each numbered
proposition only appeared once on an individual piece of paper and location. For other exhibi-
tions and more recently Burgin’s 2001 retrospective at Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona propositions
referred to by their numbers were spelled-out fully (as in the above quotation). In Burgin’s words
(2013), the Camden layout preserves the central line of the work, its “melody line” as it were.
144 E. KALYVA
meaning. This process also involves evaluation and classification, and it is

these operations that Room brings to the surface regarding art, its appre-
hension and communication.
This is the second transgression of the work’s evincive unity. While
Room may appear to be advancing an autonomous, stable whole—an
evaluation supported by the work’s exclusive allocation in the gallery
room, austere presence and serial propositional structure—its articulation
dialogically engages other systems. These may include the architectural
composition of the gallery space, the artist’s intentions, the viewer’s own
understanding and social interactions beyond the artworld. At the end,
the opening statement (1) “All substantial things which constitute this
room” can only be understood in a nexus of meaning that is conceptually,
contextually and institutionally structured. In this way, Room prompts one
to realise how even the most naturalised and factual situations or objects
can only be tentatively defined.
Recalling Wittgenstein (2002 [1921]), there is a schematic correspon-
dence between a situation and a proposition, which he calls “picture”
[Bild]. A proposition is a picture of reality that conveys the structural
logic of the situation that it represents and which already exists in a state
of affairs [Sachverhalt]. With this in mind, Room does not simply reflect or
indicate a picture of reality, a sample of already concluded artistic aspira-
tions where the work is treated as an object and its contents as referential
signs. On the contrary, it demonstrates how its status is not predetermined
and how its presence develops through the accumulation of its contents,
their interrelation and their correlation to the world. At a first level then,
by experiencing the work, Room shows a picture of reality. In this process,
there is no stable taxonomy of the relations between constituent parts and
context. Instead, what one understands as being the work and what con-
stitutes it morph through the act of viewing and reading, as this is staged
by the work. At the same time, the work reveals that all this exists in a
state of affairs. Specifically, the evaluations that Room demands from the
spectator correspond to a series of self-reflective decision-making steps. At
a second level, therefore, Room moreover measures the picture of reality it
creates against the world.
To conclude with the analysis of the work, Room does not achieve its goal
by merely utilising language and doing this in an art gallery. Its logical struc-
ture, visual presentation and the type of language used all contribute to the
work’s aim: to experience context in the work rather than refer to it. The
“otherwise” empty gallery room the visitor enters is architecturally as well as
discursively structured, filled not only with the presence of the spectator as
a requirement of communication and evaluation, but also with institutional

classifications of art. Whether one perceives the gallery room as part of the
work or whether one conceives the architectural space as an application of
the work, the conclusion is the same: the work refers to itself, to the act of
referring to itself and to the conditions of viewing, being and referring.
Rather than entertaining a casual visualisation of the idea of something
as art, Burgin’s work puts forward a set of operative criteria for the spatio-
temporal evaluation of experience. Its propositions may lie in plain view
as a matter of fact, but by reading and viewing them, the work demon-
strates how both meaning and the evaluation of what may constitute it
are not a priori concepts but subject to interpretation as a social activity.
This shares a similar critical interest with other works of the time such as
Lawrence Weiner’s Declaration of Intent (1968), discussed below, and Art
& Language’s Lecher System (1970), discussed in the next chapter. These
works challenge spectatorial behaviours and the hierarchies of evaluation
and classification that shape what is understood as “the work”, and which
in turn they seek to expose and interrogate. In this process, they support
a dialectical understanding of their realisation and experience which they
extend to everything beyond their own body—primarily, the experience of
art in general and the space that it occupies.
4.4.3 Competing Voices and Their Limits

In the historical context of the late 1960s, the language traditionally asso-
ciated with visual art was the language of expression through significant
forms. This language was clearly articulated by the expert critic who sought
to safeguard the autonomous status of the mute artwork. Here, the use
of language by conceptual art became a means to destabilise the division
between the artist and the critic—a division that, for art to function as a
placeholder of dominant ideologies, also meant a division of labour—and
to break the ideological isolation of art from social reality. Philosophical
propositions, mathematical and logical systems, maps, scripts and analyses
filled the gallery walls, exhibition catalogues and art magazines. In terms
of evaluation, the problem was not only the new and different means that
artists had at their disposal since such means could be assimilated by an
extended category of art as long as the latter retained its privileged status.
As a process, this characterises the history of art where each new break-
through eventually becomes incorporated into mainstream art production
(in other words, “new” is a relevant term and its effects are time-dependent).
146 E. KALYVA
A more pertinent problem is whether an artwork that so specifically engages

its context will be able to retain its critique if displaced to different contexts.
This too is an old debate regarding the relation between the universal and
the particular, which emerged with socially engaged art (cf. social realism
and the debate between György Lukács and Theodor Adorno), and which
keeps resurfacing. From our perspective, which examines the work in the
process of communication, to consider this problem means to consider the
extent to which the work not only continues making sense but also contin-
ues to actively negotiate its object of enquiry.
We have previously seen the case of documentation. Another way to test a
work’s contextual dependence is physical relocation. One type of relocation
is from the gallery room to the page—a move that not only was facilitated
in the case of text-based works but which was also one of their objectives.
For Room, Burgin (1972b, 1974) explains how he tried to find a generic
language capable of being applicable in different contexts while remaining
as independent from particular applications and connotations as possible.
This does not mean that location is irrelevant: as analysis has shown, the
work’s structural and procedural aspects are both contextually dependent.
Room paradigmatically negotiates the formulation of the subject and
the object in a given setting as a process which involves the activity of
looking and viewing, as well as the spectator’s relation to the work and to
her surroundings. When it is transposed to a magazine or catalogue page,
the spatial allocation of the work changes and so do its logico-semantic
relations. What previously involved physical presence and movement
across an interpersonal space, now becomes the tracing of line after line
on a single surface. True, the presence of the work on the page and its
multiple dissemination disengages it from the conditions of production
and consumption of art as imposed by the gallery system. It can therefore
retain its critique of institutional hierarchies and their systems of evalu-
ation; but it can no longer embody this critique and measure its body
against its context. This move from the public sphere of affairs to a private
one causes a third transgression. Room shows that there is neither a neutral
language nor a neutral context. By the same token, the page is not a neu-
tral site either. Since one can own it either in a magazine or more crucially
as a collectible, the page is prone to confining and isolating art through a
process that duplicates the privatisation of public experience itself.
Let us now consider the relocation of Room to a much more threaten-
ing social reality. Burgin participated in Art as Idea from England (1971,
CAYC), organised by Harrison in Buenos Aires. As discussed in the previous
chapter, socially engaged artists in Argentina sought to reinsert art in social

life and aligned themselves with the political struggle against foreign exploi-
tation and its subservient military regimes. They moved beyond the gallery
room and into the streets in order to reclaim public space, and sought alter-
native vocabularies in order to expose the surveillance, systematic repres-
sion and state violence that characterised everyday life. In such a violent
and heavily regulated reality, the logic of the social order collapses and it
becomes imperative to challenge and negate the processes that mystify both
art and social life.
Consider Juan Carlos Romero’s 4.000.000 m2 of the City of Buenos Aires
(1970), first presented at the I Certamen Nacional de Investigaciones
Visuales [I National Contest of Visual Investigations] and later at Camden
Arts Centre’s From Figuration to Art Systems (1971) (Fig. 4.2). Romero
utilises maps, photographs and diagrams to demonstrate the systemic
logic of how space is constructed and how the attitudes that correspond
to it generated, starting from inside the gallery room and progressively
expanding to the gallery building and out to the city. While the work
was produced based on the building of its initial presentation and the
city of Buenos Aires, its structure enables conceptual correlations between
any inside and outside setting, either material or discursive. This is so
because the work locates the spectator at the epicentre of an enquiry that
organically exceeds the gallery room and expands into the wider social
sphere. This interest in expanding outside the gallery space and into the
streets corresponds well with artistic activities in London at the time. Thus
Romero’s work advances an institutional critique that challenges the mys-
tification of the artistic process, and a socio-political critique that seeks to
raise awareness and uncover the workings of ideology.
Back to Art as Idea from England, Burgin presented Room, All Criteria,
Any Moment, This Position and Period of Interruption, translated into
Spanish. These works explore different ways of structuring a self-reflective
situation. They are spatially and temporally dependent, and refer to the
present moment and to objects and individuals, among other elements.
The only exception is Period of Interruption, which is only spatially depen-
dent as indicated by “(1) Any object [...] which is perpendicular to the
plane of horizon”. Even though these works have the capacity to be appli-
cable to any situation, their reading requests that there is always a situa-
tion to provide them with context. Regarding Room, the experience of
context and the structuration of experience, feelings and attitudes that it
generates are recast in its new context—a context that shifts the hierar-
chies of meaning. In Buenos Aires of the 1970s, the attempt to perceive a
148 E. KALYVA
Fig. 4.2 Juan Carlos Romero, 4.000.000 m2 de la ciudad de Buenos Aires (1970).
Text and ten photographs, 60 × 50 cm each. (Detail) (© Juan Carlos Romero. The
archive of Juan Carlos Romero)
room and all that it encloses could be understood in terms of isolation and
confinement, and more specifically with reference to the clandestine cen-
tres of illegal detention that the military regime installed throughout the
city but whose presence it systematically denied. Indeed, Romero’s pho-
tographic evidence alluded to one such centre, located inside a stationed
naval ship. By this comparison we can see that a work can make relevant
connotations depending on context if it incorporates the mechanisms that

structure meaning. Here, the evaluation would be in terms of the priority
given to these connotations—the urgency, in other words, of critique.
It was previously mentioned that Burgin (1972b) was interested in the
contingency of the object. Room demonstrates the contingency of the object
and the contingency of the systems of apprehension and evaluation. Does
it make a difference if the work uses the same medium as the instructions
for its execution or its criticism? Those aligned with the essentialist tradition
will claim that it does, and insist that artistic production remain a distinct
activity—that is, that the means and methods of the object of study remain
distinct from the means and methods of its interpretation. This distinctive-
ness is important because it has both an ideological and a self-validating
function. On the other hand, if we accept that this ontological transgression
by the work is a critical strategy—if, in other words, the work relies on the
essentialist binary in order to communicate its critique—what will happen if
this binary is lifted? In the discursive field that is generated around the work
up to the present moment, such binaries do not disappear but rather take
new shapes. Thus a work can remain capable of communicating its critique
as long as it calls attention to the underlying mechanisms that produce and
sustain the discourses, power structures, and hierarchical systems of evalua-
tion and exclusion—that is, as long as the work challenges the processes that
generate these discourses, power structures and hierarchical systems rather
than only the instances when these become embodied.
As language pushed its way up the gallery wall and the work duplicated
itself on the page, the critical voice of the artist expanded from making works
to writing texts. This move reflects the exchange of ideas between artists, but
also articulates competing voices, interests and different theoretical premises
regarding the nature and function of art. Two seminal essays are Kosuth’s
Art after philosophy and Burgin’s Situational aesthetics, both published by
Studio International in 1969. These discuss the category of art and the con-
tingency of the object, and play out two main tendencies in understanding
art and in approaching conceptual art: universal taste and the beholder’s
sensitivity, on the one hand; and understanding the aesthetic attributes of art
as defined from within particular systems of evaluation, on the other.
Kosuth’s (1969) text is an ambitious endeavour to set the terms of con-
ceptual art by way of which he also sets his own work as its exemplar.
Indeed, Kosuth’s re-telling of the story, his timing of events and personal
projection stirred much discussion at the time (Melvin 2013, 166 ff.). With
very fashionable, albeit vague, references to philosophers such as Ayer,
Wittgenstein and Urmson, and artists such as Duchamp, Judd, LeWitt and
150 E. KALYVA
Reinhardt, Kosuth formulates a popular story for conceptual art. It goes

like this: since Duchamp had showed the limits of art, the formalists had
equated art with the aesthetic and the minimalists had asserted that art is
art, and given that the twentieth century can be characterised by the end
of philosophy and the beginning of art, the term “conceptual art” can be
understood by looking into the function of art.
While echoing Wittgenstein, Kosuth’s text moves in the opposite direc-
tion. To begin with, terms such as the aesthetic/aesthetics, art/artwork and
apprehension of art/the idea in (or behind) the artwork are not rigorously
applied but used interchangeably. Second, Kosuth does not deal with art’s
use in its historical or social context. Instead, he prioritises the idea behind the
work in a way that comes very close to the traditional understanding of artistic
genius and of the work as the expression of his subjectivity and intention. As a
result, his thesis is aligned to, rather than rejecting, Greenbergian formalism.
Kosuth argues that art exists as a tautology analogous to an analytic
proposition. These terms are closely related: tautologies are self-contained
and unconditionally true because of their formal logical structure (for
example, “It is either raining or it is not”); whereas analytic propositions are
necessary true on purely logical grounds and serve to elucidate meanings
already implicit in their subject (for example, “All squares are four-sided”).
If we recall Wittgenstein, tautologies tell us nothing about the world and
lack sense (2002 [1921], 4.461). Back to Kosuth and art, the difference is
who is speaking. An art-object standing for itself as art functions indexically
to the category to which it belongs. For example, Kosuth’s One and Three
Chairs (1965) exemplifies the object in three different reiterations (it also
draws to the surface the hierarchies of evaluation and classification that run
through the artworld). An indexical function, therefore, involves a process
of identification. Moreover, if one is interested in use, one will acknowl-
edge how this process also involves evaluation. Thus rather than being a
tautological matter of fact, the statement “art is art” (or, if declared by an
artwork, “I am what I am”) requires a qualifying system.
That said, there is a case where the dictum “art is art” can be maintained as
a tautology: to become a self-evident proposition within an art system taken
as an autonomous whole. This means that one endorses the isolation of art
within such an “art system” (in which case, the artwork is left to “speak” for
itself). Of course, this still leaves such an “art system” prone to questions
about its relation to other systems such as the linguistic, the empirical, the
epistemological and so forth. If one still insists that the utterance “art is art”
is a logical truth—that is, necessarily true for all systems and not only the
“art system”—and if, moreover, one identifies the idea or intention itself as
art as Kosuth does (in other words, if one conflates what an artwork can
“say” with what the artist is saying), then one has equated the language of
art to natural language and the language used to describe art to art. Far from
looking into the use of the term “art” and how to challenge its enabling
frameworks, Kosuth’s arguments effectively support the understanding of
art as a universal and autonomous category. What is more, they further
mystify the evaluative systems that support its meaning.
On the contrary, Burgin’s essay Situational aesthetics is less proclama-
tory and more specific. Borrowing from philosophy of language, the text
discusses the conditions under which objects are perceived in distinct art
trends and the processes by which aesthetic status is attributed. Thus, art
must be considered in relation to the linguistic infrastructures that set the
conditions of apprehension. These conditions determine aesthetic systems
and it is these systems that generate objects (Burgin 1969; original empha-
sis). Furthermore, Burgin underlines how the specific nature of objects is
contingent upon the specificity of the situation, the perceptual behaviour
of which they recommend. Room is an example of this, where context and
the viewing activity determine the object, its experience and meaning.
Burgin’s model determines a dialectical relationship between context
and art that regards both artistic creation and the conceptualisation of
the category of art. Context becomes crucial in understanding how art
communicates, what artistic means are available and what critical capacity
these have to challenge that context. Despite the tendency to prioritise
the idea after Kosuth—something that effectively secures the autonomy
of the act and functions as a carte blanche for contemporary artists—the
material outcome of the realisation of an artwork is not irrelevant to the
idea that motivated its execution or to its social and discursive context.
As highlighted by the text’s title, Burgin is specifically interested in the
structuration of situations as a way of challenging the interpretive frame-
works that guide meaning-making. This brings to mind the Situationists
of Paris who, through their critical cartographies and practices of dérive
and détournement, sought to amply and consequently distort, expose or
reverse the cracks in the value systems that pre-assign and mystify the codes
of behaviour in capitalist society. While the Situationists operated in a dif-
ferent historical context and—as Peter Wollen (1999) explains in his discus-
sion of the situationist and the conceptualist cartographic practices—were
an explicitly Marxist group who consciously left the artworld and turned to
a political practice, the “situational” becomes a point of reference in concep-
tual art, especially in the sense of the critical creation of situations.
152 E. KALYVA
1. The artist may construct the piece

2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to
condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership
Fig. 4.3 Lawrence Weiner, Declaration of Intent (1968) (© Lawrence Weiner)
Duration Piece #8
Global
(Part I)
50 signed original copies of this statement, (priced at $150 each), will

constitute the only form of this piece for an indeterminate period of time.
When the entire edition has been sold, presumably to 50 “owners”, the net
proceeds resulting from its sale will be used to structure and execute its final
destiny.
All documents that accumulate as a result of its completion will join with
this statement to constitute the final form of the piece and each owner will be
given copies of all such documents.
--------/ 50
January, 1970 Douglas Huebler
Fig. 4.4 Douglas Huebler, Duration Piece # 8 (1970) (© Douglas Huebler)
In his genealogy, Kosuth mentions Weiner and Douglas Huebler. Let

us consider their Declaration of Intent (1968) and Duration Piece # 8
(1970) respectively (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4).
Weiner’s statements test the limits of universal applicability in a way sim-
ilar to Burgin’s Room; however, they are neither spatially nor temporally
dependent. For Barry Barker, Weiner’s texts create a dimension where

language and its multiplicity of meaning come together in one structure
(quoted in Weiner 1976). Here, taking the statements to be the work
itself is only one example of the possible executions that these statements
invite. It is precisely because the work generates limitless possibilities of
realisation that it is able to upset the traditional frameworks of agency and
evaluation. This is also why it is able to destabilise the object of art—or,
to use the historically relevant term, “dematerialise” it. It may well be
that one possible realisation is for a piece of paper with these statements
to become the work; but to derive from this that the work is tautologi-
cal is an evaluation that disables the work’s critical potential. Huebler’s
Duration Piece # 8 occupies the opposite position. It follows a tradition of
indications and calculated randomness but resorts to underlining its own
carrier. Unlike the infinite loop that Weiner’s work generates, Huebler’s
work may distort one’s understanding of the nature and object of art as
something finite and already concluded, yet its specified pieces of paper,
numbered and signed, lack the capacity to sustain this distortion beyond
the work’s realisation—which is to say, the work cannot exceed its own
limited condition.
To conclude, a logico-sematic analysis determines how a work com-
municates in context—this includes background knowledge, presupposi-
tions, evaluation systems, traditions, attitudes and spatial and temporal
allocation. Room creates a situation where the picture of reality that it
meticulously fabricates is forcefully measured against those perceptual and
conceptual processes that structure reality beyond the artwork. In the
case of Burgin, his works aimed to “deconstruct the ideological division
between the inside and the outside of the gallery” (1986, 12). By juxta-
posing different modes of communication and apprehension, Room desta-
bilises the myth of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign in contrast to
the pictorial, and reveals how any system of signification is constructed
according to processes of evaluation and exclusion.
Through overlapping references, Room engages the conditions of
viewing as these become perceptually, conceptually and institutionally
defined. It utilises a type of language and a methodology of engage-
ment deemed to be external to the category of art and by this seeks
to open up art to context. Yet there is no totality of experience that
the work can offer. The process of reflection that Burgin’s propositions
incite is not teleological. Rather than displaying a progressive discovery
154 E. KALYVA
of appearances, the work reveals a dialectical relationship between the

physical and the discursive environment wherein both the viewing sub-
ject and the viewed object are formulated.
4.5 The Politics of Intertextuality: Juan Carlos

Romero’s Swift en Swift (1970)
Image and text juxtapositions can function as a strategy for critically
addressing the institutional, discursive and socio-political context. Bringing
something under a different frame of reference can draw attention to the
meaning of a word, to the meaning of inscribing words, of making pictures,
of reading and viewing, and of experiencing and reflecting. The negotia-
tion of the bigger picture by an artwork is dialectically related to the view-
er’s understanding not only of that bigger picture but also of the object
in question initiating the act. Through processes of dislocation, appropria-
tion and re-semiotisation, conceptual art practices transposed practices and
value systems from different spheres of activity and duplicated them in order
to expose their limits and limitations and to indicate alternative modes of
thinking and of doing. They manipulated the habitual modes of reading
and viewing and exposed the ideological investments in their presumed
neutrality. They moreover sought to reconfigure presence and experience
across the spaces that they occupied, and to challenge the hegemonic power
structures that run across all sectors of society.
So far, we have seen works that juxtapose photographs with words or
philosophical citations, scripts, instructions and their installations, and
works that consist exclusively of propositions. Another case is works that
utilise literary references. Romero’s Swift en Swift (1970) presented excerpts
from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) printed in a visually striking
manner on four large sheets of paper. Created for a printmaking competi-
tion at the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Swift en
Swift denounces state violence and imperialist exploitation, brings to the
light the politics of the cultural sphere and substantiates the relevance of
art to political mobilisation. In order to communicate its critique, the work
creates and sustains a series of superimpositions of references, artistic tradi-
tions and modes of apprehension. This means that the work engages its
context not only via its contents but in combination with its visual presen-
tation, aesthetic elements and the stylistics of its cited text.
In relation to conceptual art, the aesthetic is usually referred to in the
negative, in the sense that such practices sought to supress the aesthetic
in art. The austere or minimal presentation of works, and in particular

text-based works, might contribute to that argument. However, a work
that seeks a clean and simple form can hardly be construed as non-aesthetic,
and the interest in achieving such a form is not unique to conceptual art.
On the other hand, even if the argument of some “anti-aesthetic” drive in
conceptual art derives from the tendency to prioritise the idea rather than
the execution of the work (as we have seen in the discussion of Kosuth), or
if it is specifically used as a means to challenge particular understandings of
the nature and function of art (as we have seen in the case of Burgin), this
does not mean that the work’s formal presentation does not participate in
the process of communication. To put it differently, one should not equate
the rejection of the investment in the aesthetic art-object as defined and
defended by the American modernist art discourse with a disinterest in the
work’s aesthetic elements and how these contribute to its apprehension. If
an ideologically laden aesthetic has been established as the criterion for the
evaluation of (modern) art, and the artwork subscribed to particular ideas
about beauty and artistic tradition, it is these premises that many concep-
tual works sought to challenge, and the analysis of their communication
cannot ignore how their visual qualities and textual stylistics participate in
this process. In fact, conceptual art has made it possible to differentiate (yet
not separate) between the system one uses and the system one contests.
4.5.1 Printmaking and the Context of Violence

We have previously discussed the changes that occurred in the Argentine
socio-political and cultural sphere in the 1960s and 1970s, a particu-
larly turbulent period in the country’s history. Foreign exploitation and
US interventionism were backed up by consecutive military dictatorships
between 1966 and 1973. These regimes implemented neoliberal policies
that lead to the extensive privatisation of natural resources and social ser-
vices, massive unemployment, impoverishment and the fragmentation of
society, conditions which were met by significant political mobilisation
and armed struggle. In 1973, the de facto military government of General
Lanusse ended and Hector Cámpora assumed the presidency after elec-
tions. Juan Perón returned from exile, yet this democratic break was short-
lived. With the latter’s death in 1974, the country was immersed in another
round of violence and political repression, culminating in the creation of
the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance and another military coup in 1976.
By the end of the decade, thousands of people were to be systematically
murdered, tortured, illegally imprisoned and forced into exile.
156 E. KALYVA
In the cultural domain, this period was characterised by a process of

modernisation that was supported by the elite, embraced internationalism
and sought to redefine national identity according to external references
and measures; in parallel, however, new forms of cultural resistance and
avant-garde practices emerged that explicitly argued against neo-colonial-
ism and US dependency (Pinta 2006; Traba 2005; Giunta 2007). Such
politically engaged practices actively participated in social mobilisation,
sought to unmask the mechanisms of state propaganda and rejected the
commercialisation and social isolation of art.
Artists utilised a Marxist analysis to determine the workings of ideol-
ogy and theories of communication to explain the processes of significa-
tion through which the artwork becomes a carrier of those ideologies.
León Ferrari (1968), talking at the I Encuentro Nacional de Arte de
Vanguardia [I National Conference of Avant-Garde Art], drew attention
to the ideology of the social and cultural elite, the means through which
the artwork can signify its meaning, the efficiency of communication and
the type of audience one wishes to reach. In the same line of seeking to
re-establish a new context and objective for art, Roberto Jacoby (1967)
cites Roland Barthes and discusses the mythification of art by the mass
media. Jacoby particularly refers to the happenings, quite popular in the
mid 1960s, which used the mass media in order to stage interventions
and reach a wider audience. Here, Jacoby argues, one should address the
function, the materiality and the ideological traps of one’s selected means
of communication for otherwise the work risks becoming mere spectacle.
The restructuring of the Argentine society into a neoliberal one, as
in other Latin American countries, involved the centralisation of cultural
production under corporative sponsorship promoting the financial and
political interests of the business elite. Examples included the Argentine
Industrial Union, Acrilico Paolini (sponsors of the Salón Premio Artistas
con Acrilicopaolini throughout the 1970s), Kaiser Industries (sponsors
of Cordoba’s art biennales), Ítalo-Argentina, the di Tella Institute and
Citybank, which negotiated an ever-swelling external loan for Argentina in
the 1980s (Goncebate and Hajduk 1996). Another notable award was the
Premio Swift de Grabado [Swift Printmaking Award], sponsored by the
company Swift and organised between 1969 and 1971. Romero partici-
pated in its 1970 edition with the work Swift en Swift.
In this period, printmaking evolved in two directions. In one case, it was
advanced as a popularised and more democratic art form, a means to contest
the validity of the unique and authored original, to embrace improvisation
and multiplicity and to support socio-political mobilisation. This approach

to printmaking was based on a tradition of participation of the arts in work-
ers’ movements and syndicalism. A notable example was the group Artistas
del Pueblo [Artists of the People]. Active in the 1920s and 1930s in the
working-class neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires such as Barracas and Boedo,
the group was politically aligned to the principles of anarchism and anarcho-
syndicalism. The political scope of their artistic practices not only concerned
appropriate thematic representations in their work, but also active involve-
ment in the workers’ mobilisation and self-organisation through pamphlets,
stencils and posters that circulated in factories and workers’ unions.
At the opposite end, printmaking was professionalised as a metier in the
1960s, and its status as an art form was safeguarded by professional asso-
ciations. The Club de la Estampa [Print Club] was founded in 1963 by
Albino Fernández in order to “promote the diffusion of prints and the cre-
ation of specialised collections” (quoted in Dolinko 2002, 47; translation
by author). The Club organised the Bienal Internacional de Grabado de
Buenos Aires Club Estampa between 1968 and 1972, while Oscar Pécora,
a prominent collector of prints, changed the name of his Galería Plástica to
Museo del Grabado [Museum of Prints] in 1960. In 1963, Pécora organised
an exhibition of prints at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires
(MNBA) and a series of national activities that aimed, as he clarified, at a
wider promotion of printmaking as an art form (Pécora 1967). The museum,
then under the direction of Romero Brest (who was to become director of
the Center for Visual Arts at the di Tella Institute), also inaugurated its Prints
Cabinet the same year. Such activities established the institutional validity
of printmaking and enhanced the commercial value of prints while raising
the profile of their collectors. Once institutionally sanctioned as an art form,
the discussion around prints concentrated on the interest in a self-reflective
exploration towards new artistic forms. This was a predominant characteristic
of modernist art and a central premise in its discourse of the apolitical and
disinterested art-object.
In 1962, Antonio Berni’s woodcut series Juanito Laguna (1962) won
the Print and Drawing Prize at the XXXI Venice Biennale. Depicting
scenes from everyday life in the Argentine slum neighbourhoods, Berni’s
work advanced a national as well as a social theme, and renewed the debate
regarding the social function of art and the tradition of printmaking as
a socially engaged practice. Particularly, it did so in a time of commer-
cial boom, on the one hand, and political instability culminating in the
military coup of 1966, on the other.
158 E. KALYVA
Romero’s work can be understood with this background in mind. In

the early 1970s and as part of the group Arte Gráfica Grupo Buenos Aires
[Graphic Art Group Buenos Aires], Romero participated in decentralised
activities beyond the metropolitan centre that aimed to develop a more
accessible and relevant artistic production. These included demonstrations
and printmaking workshops in public squares, cultural centres and facto-
ries where prints could be directly employed in socio-political struggle
(Dolinko 2002). Romero’s own artistic practice brings together prints,
maps and press clippings in often serial installations that engage with issues
of violence, political repression and national reality. His use of press clip-
pings specifically aimed to expose how official discourse portrayed the
torture, murder and disappearance of hundreds of people by the military
regime on a daily basis as the defence of law and order. A notable example
is his En homenaje a los caídos el 25/5/73 en la lucha por la liberación
1973/Homenaje a Bellocq (1973) [In homage to the fallen of 25/5/73 in the
struggle for liberation/Homage to Bellocq] (Fig. 4.5).
This work was presented at an exhibition in homage to Adolfo Bellocq,
a politically active artist and founding member of the Artistas del Pueblo,
on the occasion of his death in 1972. It superimposes a woodcut copy by
Bellocq taken from a book collection on printmakers with a serial repro-
duction of a photograph of mounted policemen taken from a newspaper.
This photograph gradually displaces the print and, in the last image,
Romero added red paint to the hand of one of the riders. In this format,
the work displays its affinity to both the printmaking tradition and to a
politically committed art. To be more precise, it demonstrates the devel-
opment of that tradition towards new artistic means and, at the same
time, advances social criticism. Characteristic of Romero’s interest in the
function and responsibility of the press, the work draws attention to media
propaganda and state violence or, better, to a history of state violence:
from the wide-scale protests in Córdoba in 1969, from where the newspa-
per image was taken (the so-called Cordobazo), to the violence that ensued
when Cámpora assumed the presidency on 25 May 1973 as indicated by
the work’s title. We can add here the massacre by paramilitary organisa-
tions and covert police forces that would soon take place at the Ezeiza
airport upon Perón’s return from exile on 20 June 1973.
By using different printmaking techniques and materials, Romero
seeks to challenge the sites where the dominant ideology is reproduced
both structurally and thematically and to invite the active engagement
of the viewer. By overlaying images and fragmented texts taken from the
daily press, his works generate an excess of information that trivialises the
Fig. 4.5 Juan Carlos Romero, En homenaje a los caídos el 25/5/73 en la lucha por
la liberación 1973/Homenaje a Bellocq 1943–1973 (1973). Photographic collage.
79.5 × 69.5 cm. Collection Museo Castagnino+macro, Rosario, Argentina
rhetoric of the press in a manner similar to how media propaganda trivi-

alises state terrorism and revolutionary struggle. However, through this
use and re-use, the very material and discursive mechanisms that support
and reproduce dominant ideologies are brought to the surface, reveal-
ing a semantic and semiotic grid of cross-information. Romero advances
this critical strategy of reading and evaluating reality in his work but also
invites the spectator to learn to apply it herself.
160 E. KALYVA
4.5.2 Naming Names? Superimposition as a Violent Act

Romero was one of the six artists to be invited to the exhibition and
competition 3er Premio Swift de Grabado [3rd Swift Printmaking Award]
(9–27 September 1970, MAMBA). In a bold formal presentation and
direct stencil impression, Swift en Swift juxtaposed literary excerpts on the
violence and corruption of modern society with its own context at a socio-
political as much as at a cultural level (Fig. 4.6).
For Romero (1970), Swift en Swift consists of two parts: one part that
transforms the semantic message of its sentences, which operate as linear
conduits, into an aesthetic one (i.e. its visual presentation); and a second
part that is guided by the text’s colour arrangement and recovers that
semantic message. The function of the work at these two levels is achieved,
the artist explains, by the difficulty in decoding the text and with the
active engagement of the viewer. With this is mind, Swift en Swift has been
described as creating an “intricate visual mesh” of decontextualisation and
re-semantisation that interrupts what could be perceived as a text-image
or a tautological reading of the work where extracts from Swift’s novel
are presented in a Swift prize competition (Romero et al. 2010, 47–48).
In this manner, the work initiates a critical commentary on its sponsor
Fig. 4.6 Installation view of Juan Carlos Romero, Swift en Swift (1970) at the
exhibition 3er Premio Swift de Grabado, 9–27 September 1970. Museum of
Modern Art, Buenos Aires. Collection Mauro Herlitzka
and on the art establishment more generally, and a strategically concealed

denouncement of the military dictatorship.
The sponsor, Swift, was a major meat processing company established
in the 1910s and which, at the time of the exhibition, was being absorbed
by North American capital. Part of the neoliberal transformation of the
Argentine economy, this involved massive employee layoffs and clashes
with the workers’ unions. For Silvia Dolinko (2012), Swift en Swift makes
a specific commentary on the relation between imperialist exploitation
and state violence since there were links between the company, its North
American connections and key Argentine government officials. At the
same time, Dolinko continues, the work’s conceptualist combination of
words, colour and lines raises questions regarding the scope of printmak-
ing as an artistic means and the work’s relation to that tradition.
Recalling Wittgenstein and Halliday, language serves as a vehicle of
reality since it conveys information about the situation of its use, user atti-
tudes and social behaviours; as such, it realises a world within which such
acts make sense and are observed. The following analysis of the work’s
logico-semantic relations will examine how the work generates meaning
and structures its critique. In order to do so, the analysis will make an
instrumental distinction between the work’s structural and procedural
aspects, and demonstrate how its various elements (size, colour, type-
face, room allocation, contents and title) guide the activity of reading and
making sense. This methodology allows us to understand what an artistic
gesture (a linguistic proposition, an image etc.) could mean in a general
context and what it means in this context where the work was experienced.
This context involves the assumptions that the viewers make, their reading
and viewing habits and their social attitudes, which the work brings to the
surface and challenges through its intertextual references.
Starting with the work’s formal presentation and structure, it consisted of
four large pieces of poster paper, 0.70 × 4 m long. These were each stencilled
with extracts from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in wide, open-form capital let-
ters. The passages ran in continuous lines without any breaks, punctuation or
accents, even though perforations due to the use of the printing matrix indi-
cated some separation between the words. In addition, the extracts were pre-
sented in different colour combinations: green and red on light blue paper,
green and black on yellow paper, red and fuchsia on pink paper, and pink and
orange on yellow paper. Regarding this selection, Romero (2012) notes that
it was made by the professional printers who produced the sheets according
to the availability of the industrial materials used.
162 E. KALYVA
These four big sheets of paper were paired and placed unframed on
the museum floor at a right angle to the opposing pair. From one per-
spective, this allocation enhanced the work’s visuality as an object. The
work occupied space inside the room as if it were a sculpture, while this
three-dimensional placement of a two-dimensional work also challenged
the habitual consideration of prints as portable objects. Furthermore, this
allocation directed the space around the work and, more precisely, enclosed
space because of its right-angle formation. However, because the sheets
remained unframed and the text ran across them unimpeded, this gener-
ated an outward tension that seemed to undermine the work’s rigid visual
matrix. At a first level, in terms of visual apprehension, the formal elements
of the work relate it to different artistic traditions: experimental printmak-
ing, minimalist sculpture, conceptual art and so forth.
For their part, the contents of Swift en Swift as literary extracts make
their own artistic references. Published in 1726, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
is a political satire of eighteenth century British society. It criticises cor-
ruption and reflects on human nature, morality and depravity. The book
was published in a time of great imperialist wars waged by the British in
the Americas, Africa and India as well as during the colonial exploitation
of Ireland, Swift’s homeland—something that Swift further addressed in A
Modest Proposal (1729). Swift’s novel has particular aesthetic and stylistic
qualities regarding its imagery, melody, rhythm, tropes and figures, mode of
narration and register. A parody written in an active first-person narrative, it
has a naïve tone early on but becomes cynical and bitter in the book’s fourth
and last part. It is from these latter pages that Romero selected his passages.
The book also combines different kinds of technical, scientific and moral
jargon. The role of language is crucial, not only within the book at the level
of plot and how Gulliver managed to communicate during his travels, but
also as a tool of political satire employed by the book’s author to expose the
limits and weaknesses of civil society and of human knowledge.
To understand the relation between what the original text does and
what the text in Romero’s work does, we must examine how the work’s
contents participate in the process of reading and viewing. The passages in
Swift en Swift are taken from Chapters 5, 6 and 10 of the book and concern
Gulliver’s fourth and last journey, “Part IV. A Voyage to the Country of
the Houyhnhnms”.7 In this part, Gulliver meets the Houyhnhnms—highly
7
The present analysis is based on the contents of the work as given in Romero et al. 2010,
42–44. Romero utilised the 1921 Spanish translation published by Calpe, Madrid with some
intelligent, talking horses—and elaborates on his views about England and

Europe. After some time and much to his dismay, Gulliver is asked to leave;
he returns to England where he becomes alienated from human society and
consequently rejects it. Because of the ample use of nouns and adjectives,
these passages are particularly descriptive. In addition, they are densely pre-
sented in consecutive sub-clauses often one-word long.
Extract 1 offers a succinct account of war tactics and enslavement: “can-
nons”, “bullets, powder”, “battles, sieges, retreats”, “limps flying in the
air”, “trampling to death under tank tracks”, “fields strewed with corpses to
feed wolves and birds of prey”. Extract 2 arrays the results of exploitation
and poverty in a series of gerunds (nouns in the Spanish version): “begging,
robbing, stealing, cheating”, “forging, gaming, lying, fawning”. Extracts
3 and 4 convey the demise of civilised society in a series of adjectives and
nouns in the negative form; in addition, Extract 4 has no subject or active
verbs: “I will enjoy perfect health of body and tranquillity of mind, I will
not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend”, “I will have no occasion of
bribing, flattering, or pimping”; “there will be no gibers, censurers, backbit-
ers, pickpockets, highwaymen”, “no pride, no vanity, no affectation”, “no
scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices”.
Romero made some changes to the original text. There are replacements
and omissions, probably because of archaic phrasing in the original text and
context-specific terms such as swords, muskets and naval battles. Other
changes seem to be for meaning in order to increase the text’s relevance
and impact on its contemporary audience. For example, in Extract 1 above,
Romero replaced the word “prince” with “country” and “horse hoofs”
with “tank tracks”, and omitted the word “victory”. Moreover, the tenses
were changed from the past to the present (Extracts 1 and 2) and from the
past to the present or to the future (Extracts 3 and 4). These extracts have
a strong lyrical effect and are quite graphic, we could say, in the imagery
that they describe. Yet their contents are not readily offered to the viewer.
The rigid visual presentation in Romero’s reproduction and conjoining of
words causes difficulties in reading the text and represses its stylistics in
terms of rhythm and flow. However, it also brings individual words to the
foreground, whose large scale and open-form presentation make their con-
notations even more striking.
alterations. Their given translation in English is based on the 1892 edition by George Bell
and Sons, London.
164 E. KALYVA
This parallel discussion helps demonstrate that there is no clear-cut

distinction between visual apprehension and conceptual understanding,
but only a tentative one in the process of analysis. Let us return to the aes-
thetic. The visual elements of the work participate in meaning-making and
affect the understanding of the contents that they mediate. (These con-
tents, moreover, have their own textual aesthetic-stylistic qualities.) Their
consideration cannot exclude references to other artistic traditions, ideas
about beauty or expectations about how an artwork is experienced, the
same way that one cannot determine the strict meaning of a word without
taking any interconnecting references or associations into account. The
problem, however, is not the impossibility of precisely dividing interpre-
tation and classification from evaluation (for example, a “lyrical” text, a
“striking” image), but rather demanding a specific evaluation: that of the
unmediated and unmotivated modernist aesthetic as a placeholder for par-
ticular class values and as the universal criterion for art.
Continuing the analysis of how the work’s structural and procedural
aspects come together, the interplay between form and intertextual ref-
erences seems to both hide and demarcate associated meaning. On the
one hand, the work’s institutional context frames it as part of a tradition
according to which prints are visual and abstract works of art rather than
readable for contents like political posters or pamphlets. And while the
work includes literary excerpts on social critique, these are presented in
a way that leaves them marginally legible. On the other hand, Swift en
Swift manipulates its visual presentation and placement in such a way that
it demands the proximity of the viewer and specifically for him or her
to stand above the work, be enclosed by its right-angle formation and
read its passages in an instance of silent discovery. During the military
dictatorship of Roberto Marcelo Levingston’s self-nominated Revolución
Argentina (June 1970–March 1971), the work’s references to violence
and corruption—what has been referred to as its “concealed” message—
appear now to be leaking out of its colourful papers that lie unframed on
the gallery floor and to extend beyond its endless sentences.
As for the work’s title, Swift en Swift [Swift in Swift], the duplication of
the proper name, Swift, is not tautological. Rather, it is a self-reference that
superimposes author, patron, the source text and the context beyond the
work. This superimposition is visually established by placing one sheet of
paper over the other and by laying all four sheets on the museum floor. As
a result, the title opens up what may seem to be a hermetically sealed text
and sets the tone for reading the work at different layers. If we add this to
the effect of the work’s structure—a rigid visual matrix of undefined limits
where the mode of execution is drawn to the surface because of the perfora-
tions caused by the printing stencils—we can see how the various elements of
Swift en Swift corroborate to stage a series of juxtapositions or contradictions
which allow the work to exceed the locality of both its referents and its own.
To summarise so far, Swift en Swift inscribes space materially, structurally
and visually, and manipulates the chain of signification at four levels: the work’s
visual elements and their symmetrical presentation, the work’s placement in
the gallery, the use of a literary text and the genre of political satire, and the
superimposition of different agents through the work’s title and contents.
These dreadful contents are colourfully presented and obscured by sequential
impression in a three-dimensional presentation of a two-dimensional print
that, engaging different traditions, transposes literature into a visual art con-
text and the visual art context into the social context. By placing Swift (the
author) inside Swift (the award competition), the work superimposes the
exploitation and social degradation that its contents refer to on the work’s
own time. This implicates the anti-labour policies of its sponsor, a patron of
the arts, and the military regime. It also makes a powerful comment on how
a political text, presented in a medium used in political mobilisation, can still
remain illegible for the gallery-goer. Furthermore, the work incites critical
reflection on the experience of everyday life by way of allegorical concealment
of meaning that both Swift and Romero employ in their works.
The contents of the work could not have been more explicit and their
visual presentation confronts the spectator who, living in a climate of terror,
is inclined to look away, remain silent and refrain from making any upset-
ting contextual associations. In this public encounter, Swift en Swift carefully
exposes the habits of reading and viewing as well as the value systems behind
the identification of what counts as a work of art, a literary text, a museum
exhibition room, a public space, a social activity. It challenges the meaning-
making processes that guide the work’s apprehension by insisting that it be
read as part of social context, and by this it also challenges the meaning of
other activities and attitudes within that social context.
Romero (1970) describes Swift en Swift as a “situational print” [“grabado
situacional”]. This is a key characteristic of Romero’s practice and can be
seen in other works such as 4.000.000 m2 of the City of Buenos Aires (1970)
and El juego lúgubre (1972). Here, the term “situational” is probably used
descriptively rather as a direct reference to the Situationists, even though the
effects of the French May of 1968 certainly resonated within the politically
active circles in Argentina. A more direct link can be made to the happenings,
166 E. KALYVA
which were being criticised as elitist, and to the need to create critical situ-
ations as opposed to playful ones. The happenings were mainly being pro-
moted by the di Tella Institute—cf. Martha Minujín’s Simultaneidad en
Simultaneidad (1966) [Simultaneity in Simultaneity], part of Three Countries
Happenings in collaboration with Allan Kaprow (New York) and Wolf Vostell
(Berlin), and Oscar Masotta’s more critical Acerca (de): Happenings [About:
Happenings] (1966), a series of two talks and three happenings.
By juxtaposing different languages through its form and contents, Swift
en Swift creates a site of critique and reflection as a public and social activ-
ity. Its intertextual references initiate a self-reflective enquiry that is mate-
rially supported by the work and extends beyond the work’s structural
parameters. In this sense, we can say that Swift en Swift stages intertextual-
ity in a social context that is understood as the material space occupied by
the work’s body as an object of art and by the spectator, but also as a site
of articulation of power structures and (re)production of ideologies.
On the occasion of the 3rd Swift Printmaking Award, Romero’s Swift en
Swift won first prize. According to the jury, the artist had developed an origi-
nal and significant proposal by introducing printmaking into the explorations
of contemporary art. He utilised a primitive technical method for the imme-
diate impression of graphic signs that required greater participation on behalf
of the contemplator, who had to undertake a conceptual reading of the work
through its visual language (3er salón Swift de grabado 1970). For Romero,
this ruling neutralised the work’s critical power, which became frozen in its
“aesthetic” legitimation (Romero et al. 2010, 48; original quotation marks).
This was not the ruling’s only effect. Since the work won first prize, it passed
into the company’s art collection. Even so, the executive board requested
that the artist produce something more conventional, a two-dimensional
print of a smaller scale, that they could pin on their office wall. It is not cer-
tain what happened to Swift en Swift (Romero 2012).
4.5.3
Artistic Practice and Political Mobilisation
While works such as Swift en Swift sought to bring the “outside” inside
the museum in order to expose any presumed neutrality of the cultural
sphere, other activities from this period sought to relocate art into the
streets. In 1971, together with Néstor García Canclini, Romero acted as an
advisor in the construction of a mural by a group of fine art students from
the University of la Plata (Romero et al. 2010, 48). The mural offered a
critical view of the local living and social conditions in Berisso, a port and
immigrant enclave in La Plata. Located near the entrance to Swift’s former
Fig. 4.7 Mural detail near the entrance to the Swift meat processing plant,
Berisso, La Plata, 1971. The archive of Juan Carlos Romero
factory, it combined different historical and social themes with popular

imagery, and employed critical juxtapositions referring to social reality. The
local community participated in the creation of the mural, and its inaugura-
tion was publically celebrated with local folklore singers and a theatre play
by a secondary school group. For the fine art students, the positive out-
comes of this endeavour were, García Canclini (1973) notes, the innovative
use of mixed techniques and local participation; yet the pertinent question
remained whether this act was efficient in breaking the hegemonic struc-
tures that ran through both art and society (Fig. 4.7).
García Canclini (1973) further explains that taking art to the streets is
not a simple matter of a physical transposition to a different environment,
but a matter of transforming that environment and of partaking in social
critique. It is a process, in other words, that demands changes across all
levels of society, and that also transforms the understanding of art, its
nature and function. This is particularly true for the classed capitalist soci-
ety which is characterised by experts, patrons and consumers.
The political concerns of Romero, like those of other artists previously
discussed, were articulated in both his artistic and his social activities.
168 E. KALYVA
Romero was member of the metal workers’ union in 1949 (Unión Bulonera
Argentina), the syndicate of the telephone workers in 1964 and the workers’
association of university docents and investigators at the National University
of La Plata from 1974 until its dissolution in 1976 after the military coup of
General Videla. At the 4o Salón Premio Artistas con Acrilicopaolini in 1973,
participating artists including Romero circulated a call for the creation of an
artists’ union, and specifically addressed how they should stop serving the
cultural elite and work instead towards establishing an authentic cultural
democracy (Romero et al. 2010, 134). Their syndicate, Sindicato Único de
Artistas Plásticos, was also dissolved in 1976.
Let us return to art exhibitions. At the 3er Salón Premio Artistas con
Acrilicopaolini (1972, MAMBA), Romero’s participation included a series
of prints comprising the word “violence”, an extract from Leonardo da
Vinci on violence and a newspaper photograph of a corpse lying in the
street. Such deployment of intertextual references and juxtapositions of
meanings and techniques are central in Romero’s work. As part of this
exhibition, da Vinci’s text was also circulated as a flyer, with one of its sen-
tences serving as the work’s title: La violencia se compone de cuatro cosas:
peso, fuerza, movimiento y golpe … (manuscrito A-1492-35 R—Breviarios de
Leonardo da Vinci) [Violence consists of four things: weight, force, movement
and blow … (manuscript A-1492-35 R—Breviaries of Leonardo da Vinci)].
On display, the prints established a set of binaries between the “black”,
repressive violence of the oppressors and the “white”, liberating violence of
the oppressed, and encouraged the viewer to think and act self-reflectively.
The starting point of this enquiry was the work’s own body, which acted as
the carrier of these propositions. The instructions read:
a) Tear up the printed page, c) [sic] Pass it onto someone else for the other
person to take action, d) Glue it to a wall, e) Burn it with violent intent,
f) Begin to apply the proposals, g) Think of future uses, h) Try other uses
to be always violent. (Romero et al. 2010, 125–126)
In the exhibition catalogue, Romero’s self-portrait resembled a police

mug-shot, while letters in a font type similar to that used in Swift en
Swift were stamped on his naked torso and face. These formed a word-
play around the words “violence” and “force”, and generated associations
between the concepts of exhibition, exposure and censorship, but also
between the artist and the images of prisoners or cadavers that appeared
in the daily press.
The next year, one month after the elections that ended Lanusse’s
dictatorship, Romero organised his solo exhibition Violencia [Violence]
(April 1973) at CAYC. The main hall was completely covered from floor
to ceiling with posters bearing the word “violence” and glued one after
the other. On the next floor, a montage of poems and texts from various
philosophical, political and religious sources addressed the issue of vio-
lence. One was “We know that violence also plays, in history, a very differ-
ent role, a revolutionary role […]” by Friedrich Engels. Finally, another
floor was filled with gruesome images and collages from the tabloid Así,
notorious for sensationalising the socio-political repression that was ram-
pant across the country. Interestingly, the May 1973 issue of Así reviewed
the show and published Romero’s positions on violence and the distinc-
tion between repressive and liberating violence (Así 1973). In such cases
of bringing the outside inside and back again, we can understand the pro-
cesses of appropriation and recontextualisation as operating within a dis-
cursive field that conceptual art practices both generated and interrogated.
At the Museum of Modern Art, Romero participated at the 4o Salón Premio
Artistas con Acrilicopaolini (3–19 August 1973) alongside Perla Benveniste,
Eduardo Leonetti, Luis Pazos and Edgardo Antonio Vigo with the work
Proceso a nuestra realidad (1972) [Process towards/Trial of our reality].
The corresponding entry in the exhibition catalogue presented a photograph
from a political rally with banners in support of the left-wing urban guerrilla
group Montoneros and José Sabino Navarro, one of its founding members.
As for the required self-presentation for the exhibition catalogue, the artists
described themselves as participating in the national and social struggle. In the
exhibition room, they erected a cement brick wall, 7 m long by 3 m high, just
before the opening of the show (Fig. 4.8).
Condemning both state and paramilitary violence, the wall was cov-
ered with political posters by the People’s Revolutionary Army in com-
memoration of the political prisoners killed in Trelew on 22 August 1972
and one designed by Romero with the phrase “Glory to the heroes of
Ezeiza. Punishment to the murderers”. Romero’s contribution referred
to the massacre at the Ezeiza airport upon Perón’s return from exile on
20 June 1973. In addition, the wall was sprayed with the slogans “Ezeiza is
Trelew” and “Support to the loyal. Crash the traitors”—slogans that were
frequently found in the streets. Finally, a card was circulated that drew
further parallels between the massacres at Ezeiza and Trelew and called
for a non-elitist art in the service of the people rather than commercial
interests. It had a drop of red acrylic paint whose use was a requirement
of participation at the show sponsored by the company Acrilico Paolini.
170 E. KALYVA
Fig. 4.8 Installation view of Perla Benveniste, Eduardo Leonetti, Luis Pazos, Juan
Carlos Romero and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Proceso a nuestra realidad (1973) at the
exhibition 4o Salón Premio Artistas con Acrilicopaolini, 3–19 August 1973. Museum
of Modern Art, Buenos Aires
The erection of a concrete wall with political posters and sprayed slo-
gans and its placement in an exhibition room brings the “street” inside
the museum room. But it not only does so in terms of materials and struc-
ture, but also in terms of what the public sees daily in the streets, and is
circulated and mediated by the press. Moreover, it physically divides the
space of art and impedes the circulation of the gallery visitors, who are
now faced with the wall’s subject matter of murder, impunity and repres-
sion. In this way, and rather than representing violence as something that
takes place elsewhere, the work forces the viewer to confront reality in this
supposed asylum for art and to recognise the extents of violence and cor-
ruption blocking the path towards democracy.
Proceso a nuestra realidad was not the only work to address social real-
ity in an exhibition that took place after the 1966–73 dictatorships had
ended—a transitional and by many accounts the most dramatic period in
recent Argentine history. Advancing their institutional and socio-political
critique, many participating artists denounced the museum’s policies and
its selection process. In response, the jury, which included Jorge Glusberg
and Le Parc, decided to divide the prize money among all the participants.
However, the sponsoring company and the museum’s director Osvaldo
Svanascini, also acting as a jury member, proceeded with individual

awards (La Opinión 1973). Later that year, Proceso a nuestra realidad was
reinstalled by the same artists at the Faculty of Law of the University of
Buenos Aires in the shape of a tomb due to the lack of space (Romero
quoted in Longoni and Mestman 2008, 450). It was quickly destroyed by
a far-right group.
In the visual art context of the 1960s and 1970s which invested heavily
in the autonomous, apolitical art-object, conceptual art practices intro-
duced means and methods not typically associated with artistic practice.
But they did so by using the means and methods of a particular other:
institutional discourse, logic and the narratives of the dominant ideology.
The qualitative difference between the plurality of voices and intertextual
references that such works introduced in comparison to their celebratory
or affirmatory reproduction, can be located in the extent to which they are
used to open up artistic production as a social activity.
The relation between art and politics is not only a matter of the first illus-
trating the second or of the agents of the former participating in activities
that fall in the area of the latter. As the above discussion has demonstrated,
this relation cannot be exclusively served by the thematic of a work but must
be negotiated in its modes of production, which the work must actively seek
to make more socially engaged. Such politically committed artistic activi-
ties seek to redefine both artistic practice and social reality and disable their
ideological division. To put it differently, an artistic activity that denounces
violence and political corruption, reconsiders the place of art in society, raises
awareness and proposes new ways of thinking and of acting differently is also
a political activity. With Argentine practices from the late 1960s and the early
1970s as such an example, one can speak of an artistic-political practice that
seeks to transform the world, art and everything in between.
4.6 Closing Remarks

Experiencing art is a social as much as a discursive activity. Interpretive frame-
works guide the recognition of both the object in question and its evaluation,
and conceptual art has demonstrated that it is within such discursive contexts
(ideological, economic, social and cultural) that the work is formulated and
communicates. A logico-semantic analysis examines how artworks communi-
cate in context by addressing the work’s form, content, modes of significa-
tion, intertextuality and context. Based on the writings of Wittgenstein and
172 E. KALYVA
Halliday, the central premise in this discussion has been that things are set in a
state of social affairs and talking about them sets them in a state of affairs thus
understood. Simply put, in order to understand what the speaker is talking
about one must know, or at least have some knowledge of, what the speaker
talks about. Apart from making a distinction at the level of a work’s semiotic
and semantic relations (how its constituent parts interrelate and how they
relate to the world), this chapter has also suggested a tentative distinction at
the level of a work’s structural and procedural aspects (its formal presentation
and the activity of reading). In reality, the work’s different aspects and ele-
ments work together, manipulating one’s apprehension of what there is to
be seen, read or understood in order to advance an institutional, social and
political critique. This creates a tension that the work employs in order to
break the neutralising discourses that context imposes on its communication,
and to define its own parameters for reading and viewing not only the work
but also the world.
Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece, Burgin’s Room and Romero’s Swift en
Swift structure a space around them—a space of inscription within the
social field of semiosis—which they exceed by interweaving propositions
and references, superimposing textual and visual presence, juxtaposing the
subject and the object, and staging situations of contradiction and trans-
gression. They operate across institutional and social space, and incite the
spectator to take a conceptual leap and relate what she understands she
is reading and viewing with where this activity takes place. To do so, they
put forward a metaphor within a metaphor of something that can only be
alluded to in the guise of something else—be it logic, literature, visual art
and its gallery setting or corporate sponsorship.
The system of reference determines its constituent parts and con-
stituent parts are thus understood to fit a given system of reference. If
conceptual art practices contested the validity of the aesthetic as a value
judgement within a particular tradition of interpreting art, this was not
because judgement comes after experience. It was because that judgement
is part of a discursive system of meaning-making and evaluation that con-
fines the dialectics of experience and reflection, and dictates the relation
between the “I” and the object, its experience and communication. This
distinction, by being instrumental to the relation between the outside and
the inside of the frame of reference, establishes that frame.
To rephrase this in its historical context, if minimalism sought to determine
what can be seen in front of the viewer, conceptual art s uggested to the con-
trary that the viewer is unable to look in front of her unless she is not looking
in front of her. One has to look and see how the work generates meaning at
the same time that it scrutinises its own authority to do so without rendering
itself incommunicable or readily available—that is, how well the work sustains
this aporia of meaning. Rather than internalising the nature of art and cel-
ebrating the idea (the idea of art, art as an idea or the idea as an idea), critically
engaged practices seek to destabilise and negate the institutional and ideologi-
cal formulations of both the object and the subject in question. Demanding
that analysis acknowledges the discursive fields of meaning that are generated
and manipulated by the work and that challenge art’s frame of reference is
conceptual art’s legacy as a critical practice.
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CHAPTER 5
Rhetorical Operations and the Discursive

Creation of Meaning
We may hide behind our speech at this appalling moment.

Art & Language (1991, n.p.)
5.1 Opening Remarks

Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, the current members of Art &
Language, explain that the artistic activities in the 1960s and 1970s gained
their critical potential from the possibility of breaking up the finely attenu-
ated “Abstract Expressionist Empire”; still, they argue, they are stuck with
the task of remembering and writing a constant re-telling of the story that
itself is vulnerable to irony (Art & Language 1997; original quotation
marks and emphasis).1 This is the story of the failure of modernism.
To be more precise, it is a story of how modernism’s most practised
instruments—colour and form—were coming to be increasingly irrelevant,
and how the categories of production that these presumed were becoming
1
Art & Language was formed in 1968 by Terry Atkinson, then lecturer at the Coventry
College of Art, David Bainbridge and Michael Baldwin, then teaching assistants at the same
institution, and Harold Hurrell. Mel Ramsden and Charles Harrison joined in 1970 and
became part of the editorial group of Art-Language in 1971. Other members included the
former students Philip Pilkington and David Rushton, and the Australians Ian Burn and
Terry Smith. New York affiliates included Michael Corris and Joseph Kosuth, who was intro-
duced as the American editor of Art-Language Issues 2 and 3 (February and June 1970). In
1970, the Coventry College of Art was absorbed by the newly created Lanchester Polytechnic,
which became Coventry University in 1992.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5_5
178 E. KALYVA
increasingly inappropriate; it was a turning point, Charles Harrison (1990,

2002) explains, where the historical development of conceptual art formed
a hiatus between the failure of the hegemony of American modernism
in the mid to late 1960s and the announcement of the artistic business
as usual under the sobriquet of post-modernism in the late 1970s. This
means that this story also tells of how the methods used by artistic prac-
tices clustered under the term “conceptual” lost their critical potential and
became incorporated into the mainstream narrative of artistic production.
It is important to understand the conditions of this failure.
First, let us start with a reiteration of the background context. Criticism
was professionally and academically established in the US in the 1930s and
1940s. What was called “New Criticism” in literature advanced the formal
analysis of the work and nothing but the work, standing on its own and
independently of the artist’s intentions and above all social influences. For
his or her part, the modernist art critic reached a peak in visibility dur-
ing the Cold War as the expert who could confer artistic value and defend
the continuity of a particularly defined artistic tradition. The modernist
“insight” into the nature of art defined its intuitive, unmediated and uni-
versal experience, and determined how art’s individual expressions evolved
linearly through solving particular problems in colour and form—a process,
in other words, which remained internal to the autonomous category of art.
This was epitomised by the self-referential enquiry of abstract expression-
ism and minimalism. As Anthony Caro (2005) summarised it, albeit from a
different perspective: “colour hits you hard; it does not last as long as form,
but it hits you harder”.
The discourse that defended the private and intuitive experience of art
maintained a hierarchy of voices between the interpreting critic, the imagi-
native artist and the moved spectator. It also upheld a division of labour
where artistic production was set apart from other forms of production.
In this context, questioning the status of the artwork as a self-contained
object was not only an artistic problem. It was also a problem that con-
cerned the conceptualisation of the function and modes of production of
art and its separation from social life. For this reason, the critique of mod-
ernism often incorporated a leftist or a Marxist critique of capitalist society.
The art critic was not only a gatekeeper but also a public persona
whose writings appeared in exhibition catalogues and were widely cir-
culated by the press, art magazines and proliferating art supplements.
Thus while modernist art discourse sought to secure the ideological
dichotomy between the mute visual language of artistic sensitivity and
RHETORICAL OPERATIONS AND THE DISCURSIVE CREATION OF MEANING 179
the language of learnt interpretation, by the end of the 1960s its own
language became increasingly lyrical. To put this paradox or the irony
another way, while the modernist art critic vouched for the privileged
voice of artistic creativity, his own inflated rhetoric transgressed the onto-
logical distinctiveness of the aesthetic experience that he professed to
defend. Indeed, Greenbergian formalism is a textbook example of how
argumentation normalises aesthetic experience.
As a third and final method of analysis of the critical use of image and
text juxtapositions in conceptual art, this chapter examines the rhetorical
operations of a work and the discursive creation of meaning. Specifically,
the analysis will identify the loan rhetoric of conceptual art and how a work
negotiates a polyphony of voices in order to comprise its own. To under-
stand this, one must locate the different frameworks that shape and define
what is the work and how it is to be understood, as well as the processes
that constitute knowledge and that normalise experience in their historical
dimension. Moreover, the analysis will consider irony and how the work’s
tropes and figures challenge the different layers of discourse that enfold it,
making it impossible to decide between literal and figural meaning.
As a case study, this chapter examines Art & Language’s Lecher System
(1970). This text-based work appeared on the gallery wall where it was
accompanied by an apparatus which its textual contents discussed, and in
different versions in exhibition catalogues, art magazines and book form.
Paradigmatic of Art & Language’s practice, the boundaries of the object
in question are not clear. By making intertextual references to art criticism,
science, philosophy and gallery talk, the work seeks to expose the exces-
sive argumentation of the modernist art critic striving to locate what was
otherwise maintained to be an intuitive and universal experience. It dem-
onstrates the dependency of that experience on language and the anxiety
of classification and identification, and it does so by causing a series of
rhetorical shifts between the overlapping modes of analysis by which the
work can be framed.
Communication is a dynamic process and so is cultural production.
Conceptual art introduced a discursive mode of critical engagement with
context. In turn, its examination must address this engagement at the time
of the event and in the work’s afterlife, and the methods of analysis dis-
cussed so far offer both a synchronic and a diachronic approach to artistic
production. However, conceptual art and its relation to the modernist
grand narrative signalled a particular problem of historiography.
180 E. KALYVA
Conceptual art put forward a cognitive demand for the recognition

of contextual association, which also put pressure on the distinguish-
ability between the work and its support mechanisms. Documentation
and dissemination in various forms become part of conceptual art’s
substance and form the corpus of its historiography. For this reason, Mike
Sperlinger (2005) argues that conceptual art is the question of where the
work ends. However, while conceptual art transformed the historiography
of art by marking a definitive break with the notion of art as a history of
styles or progressive formal refinement, neo-conceptual art rehearses this
closure and moreover indicates that neither the closure nor the dissolution
of that notion could be completed in the first instance. This, for Michael
Newman (1996), creates a paradox around the discussion of conceptual
art where it is understood both as challenging historicism and as being
measured by its enclosure. Between the historical object and the trans-
historical paradigm, and amidst subsequent historiographical narratives
that tell and re-tell its story, the provisionality of conceptual art’s critical
voice becomes the provisionality of the frameworks within which it oper-
ates, as well as the provisionality of its criticism.
To demonstrate this, the last part of this chapter traces the development
of the market for word-related objects. This transformed the page from
being a critical means to destabilise the prevailing frameworks for art’s
apprehension to an object to be looked at, be displayed in dedicated exhi-
bitions and enrich art collections. Whereas the juxtaposition of different
languages and attitudes was employed as a strategy in order to open new,
more critical and more social sites for art, a market for sketches, postcards,
notes, letters, magazines and other paraphernalia becomes established by
the end of the 1970s. This effectively institutionalised conceptual art and
rematerialised its object.
5.2 The Dialectics of Analysis
There is no neutral or independent work that arrives from an external sphere

of criticism. Rather, the work is already implicated in the context of its pro-
duction—a context which the work might choose to interrogate. If it does so,
it must dialectically negotiate its own realisation within the support systems
that it seeks to expose, since it is these support systems that define it and make
it communicable. At the same time, the object in question and its framing
shift. This is not only because of the different perspectives and interests in
one’s approach, but also because both the “work” and its context are being
redefined by historiography.
We have previously seen the effects of the relocation of conceptual art
in different material and socio-political contexts. Understanding the work
of art as a historical artefact, it would be a historiographical fallacy not to
acknowledge how the classification of conceptual art is constantly being
configured by both scholarship and the art market, and how the frame-
works that such practices sought to challenge—in this case, the currency
of the American modernism and its value systems—also change. Thus at
any given moment, there is a composite demand for uniformity placed on
a variety of historical practices whose corpus is constantly under construc-
tion. Analysis, in turn, must make clear how suitable historiographical
narratives are being written and re-written, as well as how it itself par-
ticipates in this process. In other words, analysis must acknowledge the
pitfall, which the work admits and struggles to break from, of a totalising
moment of discovery that is duplicated by our reading of the work and
conceals a process of constant reconfiguration of value.
When one deals with the object of art, it is important to make a distinction
between art as an institution and art as a historical object, and to consider
how these relate and how their relation develops historically. Peter Bürger
(1984) explains that these constructs and their associated concepts such as
the aesthetic, beauty and so forth are valid only within certain frameworks
and discourses of recognition and description. At the same time, there is
tension between different institutional frameworks, and any possible politi-
cal content of the individual artwork is not stable but subject to historical
dynamics. Bürger specifically examines the avant-garde and the break in the
history of art that this is considered to cause. He argues that this “does not
consist in the destruction of art as an institution but in the destruction of
the possibility of positing aesthetic norms as valid ones” (1984, 87). This
helps us understand the moment of critique as a dynamic process within
a system of reference whose postulates a critical practice may cause to col-
lapse, but this does not mean that new ones will not be reinserted.
Examining the discursive formulation of meaning in the case of concep-
tual art is therefore faced with a double problem: the object of study inter-
rogates its context and systems of reference, and by this also implicates its
analysis; but it also sets the object, its context and its analysis in their histori-
cal dimension. In his dialectical understanding of history, Karl Marx (1918
[1859]) maintains that any consideration of the connections between
different historical activities must self-reflectively consider their relation
to the current historical standpoint since that standpoint is the result of
182 E. KALYVA
a certain historical development from a correspondingly defined past. In

other words, this process of synthesis is the real starting point of observa-
tion and conception, even though it may appear as its result. For this rea-
son, in the process of retrospectively examining a work of art, it is not only
the work that must be critically situated in relation to context but also its
analysis in relation to history.
A third difficulty is the various discursive processes that mystify human
activity and make different aspects of social life appear as autonomous and
independent. To understand this, one must examine how the means and
modes of production (the so-called base) determine the practices and rela-
tions (the so-called superstructure) which characterise a society. As Marx
astutely observes:
The mode of production in material life determines the general character of

the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social exis-
tence determines their consciousness. (1918 [1859], 11–12)
While one can identify particular instances of mystification, these cannot be

simply resolved by shifting one’s viewpoint. This is not a matter of being
blind or unable to sustain any utopian or enlightened vision of the world.
Rather, it is a matter of changing the mode of production as the basis that
supports those instances. If one is only to re-frame the observation under
new ideological value systems, or if one ignores how one’s own methodolog-
ical framework relates to mystification and the effects that it has in shaping
the object of study, this will only result in mystifying that object even further.
The effects of discourse may appear totalising since it incorporates a
process of normalisation of knowledge and corresponding practices.
Michel Foucault (1972 [1969]) explains how discourse manipulates the
concepts of totality and continuity, and specifically how the demand for
the continuity of historical development secures the position of human
consciousness as the original subject of all human development. Yet if
one considers how discourses are structured, Foucault maintains, one can
detect methodological problems in their organisation. Discourses must
produce a coherent and homogenous corpora of documents, establish a
principle of choice that makes it possible to characterise different groups
and sub-groups and define the level of analysis, its elements and practices.
As Foucault argues, the analysis of thought is always allegorical in relation
to the discourse that it employs: “Its question is unfailingly: what was
being said in what was said?” (1972 [1969], 27–28; original emphasis)
Determining the rhetorical operations in the discursive creation of

meaning in a complex, self-reflective work such as Lecher System requires
a synthetic understanding of the above regarding the relations between a
work of art and its institutions, history, discourse and the processes that nor-
malise experience. Rhetoric has been generally associated with the power of
persuasion and, especially in mass communication, its effectiveness resides
in the oscillation between information and redundancy (Eco 1974 [1968]).
There is also a particular relation of rhetoric, as a quality of language use, to
criticism. This often requires working around the frame—the frame of ref-
erence, the frameworks of analysis and the framing (material and discursive)
of the artwork.
Paul de Man (1973) discusses the relation between literature and criticism
and argues that their difference can be located along the epistemological
axis that distinguishes rhetoric from grammar. Scrutinising the rhetorical
operations of a text’s figures and tropes, de Man identifies rhetoric at the
juncture of literal and figural speech when it becomes impossible to decide
between the two. As a method of analysis, deconstruction aims to draw to
the surface the various rhetorical operations of a text, but maintains that
meaning cannot be fully exhausted. To consider the performative dimen-
sion of language, therefore, is to consider the limits of knowledge, or what
de Man calls the impenetrable penumbra of unknowability (1979, 119).
Thus one approaches the text as a site of (inter)textual references wherein
language is not fixed by an affirmed relation to truthfulness but is essentially
tropological—that is, figured with metaphors, metonyms, similes, synecdo-
che and irony. It is a site of undecidability and unpredictability wherein
rhetoric functions; a site ridden with tension that can neither be wholly and
grammatically regulated nor structurally assimilated by language.
One of the examples that de Man uses is an instance from the 1970s
American TV series All in the Family. When the wife of the protagonist,
Archie Bunker, asked him whether he wanted the laces of his bowling
shoes tied over or under, Archie replied “What’s the difference?” In turn,
the dutiful wife responded by literally explaining the physical difference
between crossing the laces over and under. Here, de Man argues that the
grammatical model of the question becomes rhetorical not when there is
a literal meaning on the one hand and a figural meaning on the other, but
“when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices
which of the two meanings (that can be entirely contradictory) prevails”
(1973, 29–30). A second example that de Man uses is the poem Among
School Children (1928) by W.B. Yeats, which concludes with the line
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Evidently, one knows
184 E. KALYVA
what one is reading, but what exactly is that? This use of language creates
an aporia of meaning. It is this moment, and how it is constructed, that
the following analysis will try to specify. As de Man explains, “Rhetoric
radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referen-
tial aberration” (1973, 30).
Exploring the loan rhetoric of conceptual art, the discussion of Art &
Language’s work will specifically consider irony. De Man (1996a) demon-
strates that irony can be understood in three ways: as a literary device (that
is, a figure of speech with a performative aspect), as a dialectic of the self
and as a dialectics of history. Irony constantly demands that one read in a
double code with a certain degree of reflection, and forces the text into a
state of permanent parabasis. It is a “doublement” that operates through
language and creates a self-conscious relationship of the subject to itself.
Through this operation, the subject can acquire knowledge of the world
but also knowledge of the processes (both external and internal) that lead
to its own mystification. Irony therefore rises from the gaps in communi-
cation, and realising those gaps has a cognitive value. This can be used by
a work as a critical strategy in order to both destabilise and reconfigure the
meaning of its experience.
5.3 Rhetoric and the Activity of Writing: Art &

Language’s Lecher System (1970)
The practice of Art & Language paradigmatically orchestrates ambiguity.
Oscillating between theory and application, reflection and production,
their practice involves a series of moves and countermoves regarding ideas
of historical development and the aesthetic judgement of taste (Harrison
1999), as well as regarding making, theorising and historicising.
Lecher System (1970), created by Atkinson, Baldwin, Bainbridge and
Hurrell, engages the discursive context of art. Wavelengths, logic, sculp-
tural morphology and the language used in the artworld are discussed
through relevant quotations, the presence of an apparatus and a dialogue
carried out by spectator X, spectator Y and an alien. Lecher System was first
presented at the exhibition Idea Structures (1970, Camden Arts Centre),
discussed in the previous chapter, for which a text was pasted on the wall,
included in the exhibition catalogue and also made available in book form.
An abbreviated version appeared in Studio International’s July/August
1970 textual exhibition. For the installation at Camden, Bainbridge also
created what in electronics is called Lecher lines or Lecher system, an

apparatus used to measure the wavelength of radio waves consisting of
two live wires and a light bulb that connects them vertically and can be
slid along their length.
Lecher System duplicates different types of language, from scientific speak to
logic and from art criticism to habitual ways of talking about art taken from its
historical context. By manipulating different voices, the work stages a dialogi-
cal exchange between the object on the wall (“text”) and the object in the
room (“sculpture”). This exchange unfolds as the means to implicate context
and to expose the tentative distinction between what might be perceived as
the object and what identifies its experience as such. In this process, the work
performs a series of shifts in its referential content and rhetoric, and challenges
the prevailing frameworks for art by contrasting them to alternative ways of
identification and classification. As the following analysis will demonstrate,
Lecher System forces one to consider how something is held to be external and
internal to a system, what constitutes its value and where the limits of both
the work and the system lie. An initial point of enquiry here becomes: Can the
description of the work constitute the work?
Many of Art & Language’s projects negotiate their systems of classifica-
tion and rephrase the enquiry into the nature and experience of art through
a quasi-scientific methodology. Air-Conditioning Show (1966–67) deliberates
on a column of air and its definition from different perspectives including
thermodynamics. It was presented in Coventry in 1967 and in New York
in 1972 in an empty room fitted with an air-conditioning unit, while texts
such as Air-Conditioning Show/Air Show/Frameworks 1966–7 (1966–67)
and Baldwin’s Remarks on air-conditioning, published in Arts Magazine in
1967, were pasted on the wall and were also available in book form. Other
early projects that interrogated the relation between definition and experi-
ence in the guise of scientific speak were Air Show (1966), which included
separate tabulations such as Three Vocabularies for the Air Show (1966); Heat
Map (1967) and Hot, Warm, Cool, Cold (1967). In the same line of enquiry,
Hurrell and Bainbridge’s Loop (1966) consisted of a wire loop installed in a
room but concealed from view, emitting a signal that the visitor could discern
by using a receiver depending on her position.
A key interest of Art & Language is the ways by which one can inter-
rogate the discursive field that is generated by and around the object in
question. One such way is to use different kinds of juxtapositions. As they
explain in retrospect, using language as a critical practice involved the colo-
nisation of the physical and cultural space of painting with texts that stood
analogous to the modernist ones, which had dominated late modernist
186 E. KALYVA
painting (Art & Language 1997). Such an inquiry into the language used
to talk about art does not only involve replacing previously available artis-
tic means with words. Rather, it specifically contradicts what should be the
preoccupation of the artist (which was clearly demarcated from and there-
fore safeguarded the job of the art critic) and what should be the point of
artistic production in general. It is a type of juxtaposition, in other words,
that aims at the categorical indeterminacy of the object of art.
5.3.1 Changes in Education and the Artworld

Atkinson and later Bainbridge and Baldwin taught the revised Art Theory
course at Coventry between 1969 and 1971. Part of the Fine Art course
which consisted in toto of Romanticism, Epistemology, Art History,
Technos and Art Theory, the latter aimed to critically explore the ontol-
ogy of art by testing the necessary requirements of a work of art and the
reasons for making art. Specifically, it sought to challenge the concepts of
“artwork” and “artist”, and the binary mode of identifying “works of art
proper” as concluded, finite and self-contained objects in contrast to their
“accessories” such as theoretical discussions, descriptions and explanatory
notes. It included collaborations, philosophical readings and reflective dis-
cussions on the conditions of making, teaching and evaluating art. As part
of the course, the philosopher Don Locke was invited and asked to com-
ment upon whether the work produced in the course was philosophy or
not (rather than art or not). It seems that Locke commented that it was
not, albeit being interesting as such (Atkinson 1996).
While the course changes were initially accepted, both the National
Council for Diplomas in Art and Design (NCDAD) and the College’s
administration raised concerns. They maintained that there should be bal-
ance between studio work and complementary studies (for the administra-
tors, the course was considered complementary whereas for those involved
with it, it was considered akin to studio work). They also maintained that
students could not be assessed by wholly written work (i.e. the products
of Art Theory). Specific references were made to Painting and Sculpture as
chief studies and to the use of the term “studio work” to refer to the produc-
tion of tangible objects (E.E. Pullée, chief officer of the NCDAD, letter to
M. Plummer, director of the Lanchester Polytechnic, 29 July 1971; quoted
in Pilkington et al. 1971, 120). Conceptual art was specifically mentioned.
Harrison draws attention to the rigid divide between theory and studio work,
the latter narrowly understood in terms of “sweat-of-one’s-brow” types of
activity. For the administrators, Harrison continues, there could be no equation
between “art” and “research”: “so far as ‘art’ is concerned, ‘research’ is

not ‘work’” (Harrison in Pilkington et al. 1971, 122; original quotation
marks). Eventually, the course was discontinued on the basis that it did not
produce art, and the temporary contracts of Baldwin and Bainbridge were
not renewed. Atkinson, who had a permanent teaching post, remained at
Coventry until 1973 and the graduation of the course’s students.
It is important to understand this climate not only as a historical con-
text that shaped many of the critical interests of conceptual art, but also
because the debate on the relation between theory and practice has resur-
faced in contemporary discussions around art education and changes in
academic research-led programmes. Apart from these changes being dic-
tated by neoliberal policies and leading to the transformation of education
into a degree-selling business, they also have a discursive value. This value,
as well as the value of the theory/practice debate, directly relates to how
conceptual art transformed the ways in which art is understood.
In 1960, the UK Ministry of Education published the First Report of the
National Advisory Council on Art Education, which was created in 1959.
This report is generally referred to as the “Coldstream Report”, named
after the Council’s chair Sir William Coldstream. The report advocated a
liberal education in art and outlined the newly introduced Diploma in Art
and Design, a qualification which gave educational institutes more inde-
pendence to design their own courses and to set their entry requirements—
specifically, that there could be alternatives to the required O Levels (a
secondary school-leaving qualification) on academic subjects. The Report
stated that about 15% of the total course should be devoted to the h istory of
art and complementary studies (NACAE 1960, 8), and marked a definitive
change in the professionalisation of art and design by placing emphasis on
studio work. As Charles Harrison and Fred Orton explain, even though art
courses flourished under the scope of a liberal education and the commitment
to “individuality”, “creativity” and “initiative”, this was done within a mutu-
ally reinforcing set of bureaucratic protocols and alliances that reproduced
and sustained the ideology of modernism; specifically, these changes resulted
in an irreconcilable breach between studio and lecture room, practice and
theory, “doing” and “reflecting” (1982, 9–10; original quotation marks).
While in educational circles any reconsiderations of the task of the art-
ist as other than the production of artworks were resisted, the activities of
Art & Language expanded into other domains. They founded the Art &
Language Press in May 1968 and launched the Art-Language magazine
in 1969. The magazine ran with 19 issues intermittently until 1985;
a new series appeared in 1994 and 1997. Its inaugural issue, subtitled
188 E. KALYVA
“The journal of conceptual art”, opened up the field of art by characteris-

tically advancing such “conceptual” interests beyond painting and sculp-
ture, and it did so with works that were not only self-reflective but also
indeterminable. The editorial introduction drew attention to the relation
between the language of the plastic arts and its support languages, and
to the possibility of an art form evolving by taking as a point of initial
inquiry the language-use of the art society (Introduction 1969). The issue
included Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner’s
Statements and Dan Graham’s Poem-Schema (to which we will return
below). Throughout the course of its existence, the magazine became a
platform for discussion and international exchanges while the newly emerg-
ing conceptual art gained visibility and was consolidated in the artworld
through exhibitions.
In New York, the seminal exhibition Information (2 July–20 September
1970, MoMA) brought together a large number of artists—over 150—and
works from across different styles. It was a high-profile enterprise that aimed
to survey the latest developments in art as part of a continuity of tradition
and tried to do so amidst social mobilisation, the Cold War, the Vietnam
War and revolutionary struggles around the globe. Its weighty exhibition
catalogue was equally ambitious. It included references to artistic activities
and images of artworks other than those included in the show, as well as
contextual images of political rallies, the lunar landing and Che Guevara
drinking mate. It also functioned as a display site for works that were con-
sidered as participating in the show without being physically allocated in
the museum rooms. Finally, in line with the style of conceptual art exhi-
bition catalogues but without compromising its authority, the catalogue
included information gathered from the participating artists. Atkinson
and Bainbridge presented the words “Sculpture Etc.” typed in the centre
of their allocated page which, apart from their names at its top corner
as required by the catalogue’s format, was left empty. Baldwin, identified
as “Art & Language Press”, typed in: “Theoretical Fragments ‘The art
of David Bainbridge’”. The exhibition also included Weiner’s Declaration
of Intent (1968), Latham’s Art and Culture (1966–69), which was sub-
sequently acquired by the museum, and Haacke’s controversial MoMA
Poll (1970), which engaged President Nixon’s Indochina policy. Lecher
System was scheduled for exhibition but it was not presented in the end
(Information 1970).
A few blocks down the road, the New York Cultural Center presented
Art & Language Press Room, as part of its exhibition Conceptual Art/
Conceptual Aspects (10 April–25 August 1970). This was the Center’s
inaugural exhibition and was advertised as the first large-scale museum
exhibition of “this area of recent art” (press release, FDU Archives). It

also included Joseph Kosuth’s Information Room.
By 1972, conceptual art had been definitively placed on the map.
Harald Szeemann—the former director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where
he had organised When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and after which
he resigned due to the show’s bad reception—curated Documenta 5
(30 June–8 October 1972, Kassel). The exhibition was conceived as a
100-day event and included performances, happenings, lectures, Joseph
Beuys’s Office for Direct Democracy by Referendum [Büro für Direkte
Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung], “outsider” art created by patients
of mental institutions and sections such as “Idea + Idea Light” and
“Individual Mythologies”. Art & Language presented Index 01 (1972),
while their Index 02 (1972) was on display in London, at Hayward’s The
New Art (17 August–24 September 1972) (Fig. 5.1).2
Fig. 5.1 Installation view of Art & Language, Index 01 (1972) at Documenta 5,
30 June–8 October 1972, Kassel. Private collection, Switzerland
2
The exhibition catalogue of Documenta 5 indicated the members of Art & Language as
Atkinson, Bainbridge, Baldwin, Burn, Harrison, Burrell, Kosuth and Ramsden. Harrison and
Orton note that the indexing system was largely designed by Baldwin; Pilkington and
Rushton worked on the logic and the implications of indexing, while the credit to Kosuth
was for “making the installation look more-or-less up-market” (1982, 32).
190 E. KALYVA
Index exemplifies collaboration, self-referentiality and discursive

argumentation. Through more than 350 texts written by Art & Language
members, the work exposes the relations of the compatibility, incompat-
ibility and incomparability of ideas. It is also an apt example of group
dynamics. Its installation consists of cabinets filled with these texts and
an index with their cross-referenced compatibility charts pasted around
the walls (c. 125,000 combinations). For Harrison (1990), Index was a
product of a series of problems: of the art-object and of the means of its
individuation in the light of the critique of modernism, of the public and
of the means of transformation of the spectator into participant, of the
artist as author and of the means of suppression of the individual artist
as creator, and of the art-object as a relic and residue. That is, Harrison
explains, the problem of securing in the abiding curated form of the
art-object some indefeasible representation of its contingent status as art
work (1990, 64; original emphasis).
5.3.2
The Dissonance of Greenbergian Formalism
Lecher System creates dissonance between the way critics talk in order to
substantiate their claims about the nature of art and the characteristics
of the type of art that they wish to define and defend—namely, an art
that communicates without mediation and has a universal aesthetic. It
generates discursive instability across different ideological and widespread
positions regarding art, spectatorial expectations and the social space that
artworks occupy. It exceeds the page and expands into the material and
the spatio-temporal matrix of its gallery display but resists any readily
available summation of experience. By challenging the prevailing model
of Greenbergian formalism and the audience’s corresponding aspirations,
Lecher System exposes pertinent curatorial anxieties regarding the status of
the art-object or, to put it differently, it reveals the desire to fetishise the
object as a cultural practice. As Art & Language (2005) note, the descrip-
tion of items as “words”, “texts”, “paintings”, “photographs” or “installa-
tions” becomes plausible as a matter of curatorial or journalistic decorum.
As such, Lecher System can be understood as a mise en scène of the his-
torical, contextual, material and discursive dictates that shape the work
of art, a mise en scène of configurations and re-configurations of support-
ing discourses which become the work. To consider the work of Art &
Language, therefore, is to consider the ways in which discourses are main-
tained—the discourse around the work that consolidates it as the object in
question, as well as the discourse that the work self-reflectively generates.
Before examining the particular rhetorical shifts that Lecher System

performs, we must first understand its setting. In this case, it is the contrast
between a phenomenological approach to art and a rigorous one that
considers art as a dynamic system as well as its relation to other social
phenomena. In context, a phenomenological, descriptive approach to artis-
tic production was defended by Clement Greenberg (1970 [1968]) as a his-
tory of styles. However, artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s created
a problem. In an increasingly commercialised society of mass production
where art was quantified and widely distributed, it was becoming ever more
difficult to maintain consensus on the kind of experience that such art
offered, let alone continue in the belief that it embodied a self-evident
value system. It may be that mass consumption was advocated in political
discourse and the capitalisation on art was ideologically sanctioned by the
conservative elite, paradigmatically promoted by Cold War propaganda and
set against socially committed art. But mass production in cultural terms
threatened to destabilise the category of “high art” and the pretext of the
art collector as an apolitical philanthropist who sought to cultivate taste.
In order to uphold the continuity of historical development and the
autonomy of the art system, the difficult task for Greenberg (1971) was to
reconcile a polyphony of artistic production where not only the boundar-
ies between different art forms were being obliterated, but also between
art and everything else. Indeed, the stakes were high. On the one hand,
there were the ideological demands on art as a placeholder for bourgeois
values in capitalist society. On the other hand, one had to account for
a plurality of styles in phenomenological terms while still upholding the
distinction between high and low (popular) culture. Greenberg employed
two means to deal with this problem. The first was the irreducible value
judgement of quality and the disinterestedness of taste after Immanuel
Kant. Appropriating Kant to meet his needs, Greenberg (1975) argues
that there is no distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic, and
that to have an aesthetic experience is to make a judgement of taste.3 This
served the requirements of a self-validating closed system of particular
values. Second, Greenberg borrowed the idea of paradigm shifts as part of
a self-critical process of development in art, which was parallel to Thomas
Kuhn’s widely accepted understanding of paradigm shifts as the basis of
scientific progress.
3
Peter Osborne (2004) clarifies how most of the discussion around the aesthetic in rela-
tion to art and the ontological distinctiveness of the work of art derives from Jena
Romanticism rather than Kant himself.
192 E. KALYVA
For Kuhn (1962), paradigm shifts create new fields of knowledge by

causing previous, inadequate theories to collapse and offer new ways
of understanding. Even though such shifts seem to rupture the field of
knowledge, they are born out of necessity, Kuhn maintains, and become
self-driven problem-solving movements within their own area of inter-
est. Most importantly, such shifts do not contradict the overall continuity
of the history of knowledge (see the incommensurability of paradigms).
Greenberg used this idea of an inward-looking self-criticism and the cre-
ation of the new as part of the old in order to defend the continuity of
art, and specifically American art as having its origin in the tradition of
European art but now standing in its own right. In this way, Greenberg
managed to secure both the continuity of art and its standards of excellence,
for otherwise “modernist art would lack both substance and justification”
(1961, 108). At the same time, self-criticism becomes instrumental in
delineating and securing an area of autonomous specialisation. Greenberg
(1961) goes as far as to say that self-criticism lies at the heart of Western
civilisation—and by saying so, he also substantiates his own claims.
The self-criticism of art that Greenbergian formalism accommodated
was a certain type of internalised criticism that occupied itself only with
those enquiries that supported art’s purported autonomous status. In this
way, Greenbergian formalism was able to live up to the expectations of the
modernist aesthetic, validate an expanding corpus of art-objects and secure
an autonomous art system of prevailing liberal values. At the same time, it
safeguarded the value of the professional art critic as the expert who could
“objectively” defend the private and intuitive experience of art as well as
discern artistic quality in its different manifestations. For the critic was not
only equipped with well-attuned taste. He or she also had a toolbox of
quasi-scientific methodological criteria and was ready to endure the hover-
ing threat of any communist, nuclear or alien invasion.
In the 1970s, however, and faced with changes across the socio-
political and cultural spheres including social and civil rights movements,
anti-imperial struggles, alternative paradigms for producing and experi-
encing art, and artists’ self-organisation and activities beyond the gal-
lery system, the modernist construct cracked under the weight of its own
irreconcilable paradoxes. As Harrison observes, despite a certain inability
on behalf of conceptual art practices to conceive and represent the condi-
tions of this failure, this failure was symptomatic of several elements of
modernism:
the loss of critical power in Modernist culture; of the bureaucratisation of

the imagination in the name of the sensitive; of the restriction of the cogni-
tive in the name of the visual; of the suppression of the critical in the name
of the creative; and of the marginalisation of the participant in the name of
the beholder. (1988, 43)
5.3.3 Movement in Four Acts

Lecher System creates shifts in its rhetorical and referential contents by
overlapping different systems of reference. Taking these systems of refer-
ences as well as their discourses and vocabularies on loan, the work oper-
ates through a loan rhetoric. Specifically, it stages the indistinguishability
between literal and figural meaning as a critical strategy by which it per-
forms in language the different ways in which the work can be framed.
The discursive instability that these juxtapositions generate is formally
supported by the allocation of the text and the apparatus in the room. In
doing so, the work constitutes itself, but only tentatively.
Lecher System begins with the sections entitled “Properties” and “&
Quasi-properties”. With quotations from standard books on wavelengths
and empirical observations, these sections explain the physical behaviour
of waves and the measurement of wavelength and frequency.
Scientific texts that were considered to be beyond the characteris-
tic reading material of the artist became a possible source of criticism.
Breakthroughs at the turn of the twentieth century included the specifi-
cation of the atomic structure without direct observation by Niels Bohr,
James Maxwell’s equations in electromagnetics and the conceptualisa-
tion of discontinuity in early quantum theory by Erwin Schrödinger. In
the second half of the century, structural considerations in anthropology
after Claude Lévi-Strauss and in scientific thought after Kuhn’s concept
of paradigm shifts advanced new models for the systematisation of knowl-
edge and its associated vocabularies. Thus the “scientific method” became
synonymous with “modernisation” and expanded into the humanities. In
addition, technological advancements throughout the 1960s rekindled the
exchange between art and science. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) and the motto “the medium is the
message” became influential in the artworld, and the interest in technology
and science was reflected in art exhibitions such as Cybernetic Serendipity:
The Computer and the Arts (1968, ICA, London) and The Machine as Seen
at the End of the Mechanical Age (1969, MoMA, New York).
194 E. KALYVA
Let us return to Lecher System and its discussion of wavelengths. It

argues that, if one were “endowed with a special kind of vision”, one could
observe the waning and waxing of waves depending on one’s relevant posi-
tion. It also notes that the orientation and intensity of the electro-magnetic
field are important, whereas depending on the frequency of the waves, dif-
ferent technology might be used for their detection. At this point, the text
turns to the “Gallery Sculpture” (original quotation marks). What stood
inside the gallery next to the text was a Lecher system or Lecher lines—an
apparatus that allows one to discern wavelength by linking its transmission
lines with a light bulb (Fig. 5.2). This is the first frame that Lecher System
sets: borrowing from science, it demonstrates the measurability of natural
phenomena by the use of instruments and the quantifiable evaluation of
their experience. It also underlines the two founding principles of the sci-
entific method: provability and repeatability.
The second section of the text is entitled “Lecher system: the total
classification”. It discusses pertinent questions regarding the category of
art through intertextual references to logic and linguistics. It refers to
Fig. 5.2 Installation view of Art & Language, Lecher System (1970) and Lecher
Lines (1970) at the exhibition Idea Structures, 24 June–19 July 1970. Camden
Arts Centre, London
Kurt Gödel, Wittgenstein’s contemporary, whose incompleteness theorem

argues that the criteria of a system are external to the system and cannot
be proven by the axioms within that system. In terms of the different
branches of linguistic analysis, the text refers to semiotics, which considers
the internal organisation of language; semantics, which considers the com-
positional, conventional meaning of propositions; and pragmatics, which
considers the use and function of propositions and interactional meaning.
Using this subject matter, the text presents a series of logical formula-
tions that only appear to make sense and attempts a logical breakdown of
intentionality, the criteria of interpretation and the sufficient conditions
of description with reference to “Lecher System” (original quotation
marks). Additional points of view are arrayed in the sections “Without
Pragmatics (?)”, which contemplates the distinction between “formal”
and “material” entailment and the work’s “descriptive” elements; and
“Natural Sculpture”, which returns to the criteria of observation and its
discursive surroundings.
Lecher System elaborates a discursive exchange between the text and
the apparatus (that is, between the work’s “descriptive” elements and the
physical properties of the instrument, both of which are referred to in the
text). This exchange moves across different frameworks and extends to
the relationship between the work and the viewer. By doing so, it draws
attention to the qualities of the system of classification. This is another cen-
tral premise in science: the physical properties of the instrument determine
the scope of the experiment, the limits of observation and the evaluation
of its findings. This deliberation creates a second, systemic frame for the
object in question. This frame guides what is perceived to be the work
and it cannot be held to be categorically external to its evaluation. In this
way, Lecher System both sets itself as an intermediary of apprehension and
relativises its own position by opening itself up to interpretation. As this
section of the text concludes, “‘Lecher System’ is a pretty good example
of a situation which will support a proliferation of manières de parler”
(original emphasis).
These “manners of speaking” are addressed in the section that follows.
“Lecher system: general notes on prescriptions and norms” presents a series
of reflections on how cultural artefacts such as works of art are classified. It
reflects on how works by Moore (interested in natural forms), Duchamp
(who paradigmatically used ready-mades) and Bainbridge (who set up a
practical instrument) would be classified in the year 2500 and exhibited in a
museum of art, of natural history, of industrial artefacts and of useless objects.
Moreover, the text notes how such works are embedded in literature—an
196 E. KALYVA
“unconvincing festooning” created by the way artists talk about their work
but also by the way one talks as an art critic or as a spectator. Here, Lecher
System exposes itself to a third, institutional framework which it also
re-enacts: the artworld. Appropriately changing its own language into a
more speculative way of speaking, the text one reads can be considered
as another example of festooning. As the text admits, “You can’t stop
the attempts but you can attempt to show these attempts to be absurd”.
In response, Lecher System proposes an empirical enquiry into the use of
language, while both describing and performing a literary framing of art.
The last part of Lecher System is a mock dialogue between spectator X,
spectator Y and an alien. This was presented in Studio International’s July/
August 1970 textual exhibition together with an introductory note and
a sketch of the apparatus. In a theatrical fashion, the text reiterates con-
temporary attitudes towards classification, intentionality and interpreta-
tion. References are made to iconology after Panofsky, minimalism, the
work of Giacometti and Moore and Robert Morris’s thesis on sculpture.
In their dialogue, the interlocutors note that the work is too discursive
and convoluted. However, this reference to the “work” is not to the text as
the medium which relays their conversation but to the object of their atten-
tion, which functions both as an apparatus for the measurement of waves
and as a sculpture. Being the only one who can directly and without aid
observe the waves, the alien argues that existing vocabularies are inadequate
and that the criteria for the individuation, and accordingly interpretation,
of sculpture are not clear. In other words, classification, identification and
interpretation are not independent or irrelevant to the object in question.
As a final rhetorical shift, the text sets itself both as external to the appa-
ratus (by presenting what people would say about it) and as internal to it
(by embedding itself in the process of its apprehension). At the end, the
problem is, the alien observes, that “The situation is doubly fraughtuous”.
To summarise, Lecher System demonstrates different frameworks for art.
At the same time, its own body becomes one such act of framing of the
elusive work of art, which is always referred to but never quite determined.
It demonstrates this by attempting to both describe and execute a case of
entailment. (Entailment, or logical consequence, can be formally shown,
cannot be untrue and is a priori since it cannot be influenced by empirical
knowledge. To return to an example previously used, all frogs are green,
Kermit is a frog, therefore Kermit is green. The notation of “therefore”
is three dots in an upright triangle; a down-facing triangle is the sign of
“because”. Unlike “therefore”, “because” can be context-dependent.) It
contrasts the language of logic and science with that of the artworld, but
also precision with discourse and provability with speculation. In this

process, it deliberates on different points of view in order to approximate
an electrical apparatus that it sets up as a sculpture. This choice implicates
the quasi-scientific rhetoric of the modernist art critic but also the work’s
art context where ready-mades, industrial objects and technology were
often used.
As the work unfolds through this self-reflective dialogical enquiry, it
incorporates several points of irony that the audience could resolve by taking
its contents to be literal. This would explain what the work does, even why it
does it. But not why it does it here and now as part of an art exhibition. It is
this resistance to take itself seriously that Lecher System manipulates in order
to expose the frameworks of art. To put it another way, the work draws to
the surface the desire of the spectator to view something and the satisfaction
one takes from understanding that something, especially if its apprehension
is so demanding. Yet the biggest irony is that despite the work’s excruciating
analysis, its own incommensurable plurality of voices remains precisely that.
The apparatus serves as a demonstration of the principles described in
the text as much as the text describes the object, while both are doing
more things than indicating their relationship. One can refer to the instru-
mentality of the object in order to separate it from the text, but then this
premise would have to be mitigated for that object to also comply with its
classification as an art-object. The case where one would accept the text
as the artwork and not the apparatus is less plausible. If one is willing to
accept discourse why not a technical instrument? One possible way out of
this is to extend the category of art (or a particular understanding of “art”,
Lecher System reminds us) in order to include such things as texts on the
wall, essays, catalogue entries, descriptions and instruments to be allowed
to stand in and become its objects.
But the work does not end there, at mere recognition and acceptance.
It repeatedly draws attention to the making of this choice—a choice it
introduces while trying to talk its way out of by a constant framing and
re-framing of its premises. The carrier of this act may be standing in front
of the viewer but the work is not the only responsible agent. Recalling
Bürger’s (1984) discussion on the invalidation of aesthetic norms, Lecher
System exemplifies this process by presenting the object as an instrument
(and the indisputable scientific principles behind it), as art (and the phe-
nomenological discourse around it) and as a function of rhetoric. There
is a discursive field, in other words, that defines the object but cannot
permanently stabilise it. Lecher System sustains this aporia by juxtaposing a
scientific instrument in the gallery room with a varying text that elaborates
198 E. KALYVA
on the incompleteness of classification systems and language use, and by

contrasting different voices and points of view in a loan rhetoric by which
the work becomes one such figure of speech.
As a speculative play of modernist imagination this offers no satisfac-
tion. There is too little for the clairvoyant critic to “recover” through
skilful interpretation and to claim as unmediated experience, and even less
for the spectator to enjoy intuitively. All seems to be already saturated and
entangled. As for the reader, she is constantly reminded how discursive
operations shape viewing and reading while standing in front of a very
long text and a very straightforward instrument while not being altogether
clear of what there is to be seen. At the end, the work offers no possibility
of pleasure through the enactment of one’s critique of judgement, since it
cannot recover from the constant interruptions of its discourse.
5.3.4 A Long-Lasting Irony?

John Roberts (1999) suggests that Art & Language’s modalities of self-
reflexiveness can be described as a dark rhetorics of looking and reading.
Employed in the process of contaminating conceptual art’s self-image,
this dark rhetorics, Roberts explains, engages and tests the spectator’s
assurances and customary reflexes, and reflects the modernist hysterisation
of the social function of art. We can understand Lecher System as one such
example of constant negotiation between the text and the apparatus, insti-
tutional agents and spectatorial attitudes, the viewer/reader of the work
and the work, the work and its context, the objects in the room and other
exhibits, the exhibition catalogue or magazine page and the object of art
and so on. With a body and a voice that are permanently on loan from
other fields, it shows how it is not a self-sustained object. Indeed, it con-
stantly seeks to expose and maintain the impossibility of deciding what
exactly constitutes it and what is independent of it.
Nonetheless, and while the modernism that was theorised in the domi-
nant forms of criticism from the mid 1960s was morally oppressive, cogni-
tively exhausted and materially entrenched, Harrison (2003) argues, there
could be no critically adequate form of continuation of the practice of
art that did not avail or imply both an account of the practical exhaus-
tion of modernist protocols and an account by which the effective power
of those protocols was nevertheless sustained. Fifteen years after the first
presentation of Lecher System, Ernst Gombrich’s essay Image and word
in twentieth-century art (1985) celebrates the distinguishability between
images and words. Discussing cubist collages and James Whistler’s titles,
Gombrich argues that this distinguishability plays out the distinction both
between the universal and the particular, and between something con-
crete and inexhaustibly rich in sensory qualities and something abstract
and purely conventional. For its part, Robert Morris’s Words and images
in modernism and post-modernism (1989) maintains that the linguistic
imposes a discontinuity on the site of the aesthetic.
The image and text juxtapositions of conceptual art can be understood
as such an instance of discontinuity that aimed to challenge particular aes-
thetic norms and attitudes, and they did so by deploying particular types of
language. The accounts of Gombrich and Morris make certain convenient
generalisations and articulate preferred genealogies within modernism.
Their position is also telling of something else: a mode of thinking that
requires binary opposites in order to function. In contrast to Harrison’s
dialectic understanding of the process of art history, this type of rhetori-
cal framing is based on a cohort of binaries (logic/senses, mind/body,
culture/nature, masculine/feminine) that can be traced back to Gotthold
Lessing’s Laocoön (1984 [1766]), and characterise the essentialist tenden-
cies within art history. A work may employ this antithesis instrumentally
as part of its critical gesture, or it may reify such binaries ontologically and
celebrate them. It is the task of the analysis to demonstrate the former and
resist the latter by understanding the social and ideological premises of
this process.
Let us return to Kant and deconstruction. One way of approaching the
ineffable is in phenomenological terms. Modernist art discourse defended
universal and intuitive aesthetic experience, and could therefore only talk
about appearances and how self-realisation comes in waves once one is
exposed to such an experience. This process offers a gratifying feeling
because it allows one to enact one’s faculty of reason in the understand-
ing of that which cannot be immediately grasped, and offers a sense of
belonging to the human community. This was the main premise of Kant’s
Critique of Judgement (1952 [1790]) by which he tried to reconcile his
theses on practical and pure reason with the human faculty of judgement.
Central in this account is the notion of the sublime: the ineffable and terri-
fying evocation of emotions. However, in his effort to analyse the sublime,
Kant initiates a classification of the mathematical and the dynamic sublime
that is only possible in language. Specifically, de Man (1996b) explains
that it is the materiality of the text as a site of linguistic operations and a
plurality of voices that provides a conceptual resolution to Kant’s philo-
sophical problem.
200 E. KALYVA
Can the same be said for Lecher System? As in Kant’s account of the
sublime, Lecher System resolves a conceptual problem regarding the ad
hoc characteristics of a system textually. It demonstrates the category of
art and the aesthetic as its criterion to be linguistic categories, tropes per-
formed in language which the work exposes by oscillating between the
literal and the figural.
If conceptual art caused trouble for critics and curators alike, this did
not derive from any inability to demarcate critical from poetic language.
Besides, as a theory of frame, the modernist art discourse knew its way
around images and works that used words could be easily treated as part
of an enquiry into perception after post-minimalism. Rather, many con-
ceptual art practices utilised the relation between image and text in order
to destabilise their own presence and permanence, and by this to also
expose the historical, material and discursive processes that support their
recognition, classification and apprehension as such. By often resorting to
irony, they aimed to upset the categorical dinstinctiveness of art as a way
towards self-realisation.
5.4 Market Trends: Language, Pages

and “Wordworks” on Show
The historical period of conceptual art has been understood as coming

between the failure of the hegemony of American modernism—a failure
that it exasperated—and a post-modernistic “business as usual”. The art-
world is a sphere of activity where, like other market areas, everything
goes. Critically engaged conceptual art practices used a particular type
of language (that of the philosopher, the art critic, the scientist, the
journalist, the policymaker) in order to open up the concept of art. By
advancing the discursive instability and material indistinguishability of
the work, they challenged the habitual modes of viewing, the apprehen-
sion of art as a distinct and autonomous category, the commodifica-
tion of the art-object and the dominant ideologies that run within and
beyond the cultural sphere. As we have seen, the use of language is not
ipso facto critical. The work must negotiate its own condition of produc-
tion and display, and support its critical claims materially and discursively
rather than simply profess that intention. In other words, the how is
equally important as the what, if not more so.
Exhibition catalogues, museum bulletins and art magazines played an

important role in the dissemination of artists’ works and ideas. Since many
of these activities operated outside the circuits of mainstream institutions
and across international networks, the use of the easily transportable and
cheaply reproduced page had also practical advantages. Another reason
that supported the concept of “suitcase shows” (exhibitions that could be
transported in a suitcase or mailed to their location) was censorship, as in
the case of CAYC.
However, by the second half of the 1970s, the use of language was
reframed in new artistic categories such as “textual artworks” or “word-
works”. Together with a renewed interest in artists’ books, a correspond-
ing market for anything related to the page emerged. The following
discussion will re-tell the story of conceptual art as a history of exhibitions
and related publications. This will be a final layer of synthesis to the case
studies and frames of reference previously discussed which, recalling Marx,
is the real starting point of observation from our current historical stand-
point even though it may appear as its result.
5.4.1 The Page and the Art Press

If introducing language to a visual art setting challenged the institutional
framing of the object and the divide between theory and practice, its presence
in the magazine sought to destabilise the concepts of authorship, ownership,
and of the singular and concluded art-object. This was achieved by u tilising
the seriality of mechanical reproduction as well as the formal elements of the
page in order to disrupt the notion of the artistic genius, structure experience
and encourage participation. Many critical activities also aimed to challenge
the ideological function of the press and its politico-economic interests.
By doing so, they contested the validity of the page as a site of art criticism
and as a site of advertisement and propaganda, and aimed to negate the isola-
tion of art from other spheres of social activity.
The term “art press” covers a wide range of initiatives that vary in their
orientation and treatment of their subject matter. Established art maga-
zines such as Studio International, Art Monthly, Art International, Arts
Magazine, Artforum and October (the latter resulting from a dispute among
the editors of Artforum in 1976) had different social outlook, admin-
istration policies and target audiences, ranging from the general reader
interested in art news and emerging artists to professional art critics, his-
torians, dealers and collectors. Equally, the publications of museums and
202 E. KALYVA
galleries ranged from, for example, Museumjournaal, jointly published by

four Dutch museums and used by dealers and collectors to stay informed
(Herbert and Herbert 2009), to Art & Project Bulletin, published by the
homonymous Amsterdam gallery between 1969 and 1989.
Art & Project Bulletin helped develop an international artists’ network
and encouraged the idea of “exhibition by mail”. It was mailed freely and
distributed to the gallery’s visitors and, albeit having started as a means to
announce forthcoming exhibitions, it gradually became more experimental
in its treatment of the page as a creative site. The bulletins had a consistent
cover design and typically four pages sized 29.5 × 21 cm, which were left at
the disposal of the participating artist. Bulletin No. 23 (1970) was utilised
by Keith Arnatt, where he offered a description of his An Exhibition of the
Duration of the Exhibition (1970), shown as a digital countdown device
at Idea Structures (1970, Camden Arts Centre). It also included a detach-
able coupon for the sale of itemised time blocks, but as Harrison (2009,
7) recalls, no one “ever took the bait”. Bulletin No. 24 (1970) was not
produced but nevertheless was numbered as per Daniel Buren’s instruc-
tions for a non-project, and the blank pages of Bulletin No. 43 (1971)
were folded into squares as requested by Sol LeWitt. In the aftermath,
the Bulletin has enjoyed dedicated museum exhibitions such as In & Out
of Amsterdam: Art & Project Bulletin, 1968–1989 (15 July–26 October
2009, MoMA) and is now available for sale in a collectible box set.
Another notable example of opening up the creative act and transform-
ing an art magazine into an exhibition site was Studio International’s
July/August 1970 issue 180(924). The editor Peter Townsend invited
Seth Siegelaub to organise a “summer exhibition”. In turn, Siegelaub
asked six art critics from the US, UK, France, Italy and Germany (David
Antin, Lucy Lippard, Charles Harrison, Germano Celant, Michel Claura
and Hans Strelow) to each take an eight-page section of the magazine and
work with artists of their choice. The endeavour took up most of the mag-
azine, apart from advertisements, exhibition announcements relevant to
the participating artists and a reviews section. The texts appear in English,
French and German and the ensemble was also published by Siegelaub in
a hardcover edition entitled July/August Exhibition Book (1970).
Harrison’s section included Art & Language’s variation of Lecher System
and a sketch of its apparatus; Arnatt’s proposition “This statement appears
on this wall” given in a series of semantic and semiotic variations (appear-
ing on the other wall, referring to another statement etc.); and Burgin’s
Any Moment (1970). Claura invited Buren, who filled all eight pages
with yellow vertical stripes that appeared to be shifting across the spreads.
Lippard requested from her selected artists that each provide “a situation
within which the next artist on the list is to work” (original emphasis).
Their instructions were reproduced as a header to each consequent con-
tribution. Weiner’s instructions to On Kawara read:
Dear On Kawara,
I must apologise but the only situation I can bring myself to impose upon
you would be my hopes for your having a good day.
Fond regards,
Lawrence Weiner.
In response, Kawara displayed the confirmation receipt of his telegraph

to Sol LeWitt, also part of Lippard’s selection, from February 1970 reading
“I am still alive”. Sentences like this and “I got up” are typical of Kawara’s
serial works, which, in the form of telegraphs and postcards, were sent to
collectors, critics and artists with the only alteration being the date and
the location. In turn, the contents of that telegraph were used in lieu of
Kawara’s instructions to LeWitt, to which the latter responded with a list of
possible word combinations of the sentence “I am still alive” and Kawara’s
name.
Compare Studio International’s summer issue to the April 1970 issue
of Arts Magazine, 44(6), published across the Atlantic. Gregory Battcock
invited Weiner, LeWitt, Mel Bochner and Buren to submit a page-
long document. Entitled Documentation in conceptual art, this project
illustrates well the different trends and approaches to language use. Leaving
open questions regarding the choice of the title, Battcock’s introduction
argued that the texts submitted by the participating artists were “appar-
ently intended to be evaluated as art rather than as criticism, aesthetics, or
reportage”; and that their major contribution to art was the blurring of
the traditional borders between literature criticism, theory and reproduc-
tion (Documentation in conceptual art 1970, 42). Of course, saying that
something blurs borders or distinctions—for example, between art proper
and accessory information—does not in itself produce a work that supports
and sustains this act of defiance.
Weiner submitted his sentences on the conditions of a work’s construc-
tion generally known as Declaration of Intent (1968). Presented in a neu-
tral and instructive language, this text is often taken as the work even
though, as discussed in the previous chapter, this forms only one of the
204 E. KALYVA
possibilities of its execution. The contributions of LeWitt and Bochner fit

better with the project’s title. LeWitt presented a series of observations
regarding his wall drawings and Bochner sent sketches of his Theory of
Boundaries (1969–70), a work that visually engages the limits of percep-
tion. Bochner’s works use language symbolically and metaphorically, and
are generally understood within the American modernist art tradition of a
phenomenological exploration of the nature of sculpture. For Rosalind
Krauss (1973), Bochner’s activities map the linguistic onto the perceptual,
extend the tradition of individual expression into more refined aesthetic
conventions, and serve as the testimony of private and mental images. In
a much more critical and political tone, Buren’s text—entitled It rains,
it snows, it paints—reflectively addressed the different languages used to
talk about art and the competing interests across intellectuals, the art mar-
ket, artists and consumers, each taking part in the process of identifying
what is considered to be the work.
A different way of engaging with the page, discourse and the function of
the press explored Dan Graham. His works Schema (March 1966) (1966)
and Homes for America (1966–67) draw attention to how the formal ele-
ments of the serial page and the particular type of publication frame what
one sees, reads and understands. Schema lays out a set of parameters for
its execution which also becomes the work. It is a matrix that indicates
how the format of each publication will shape the resulting outcome—the
Poem—for example, the weight of the paper and the font size, but also the
number of words, adjectives, lines, capitalised words and so on. For Graham
(2001 [1969], 97), Schema takes its own measure of itself as place, being
both art and art criticism. The work refers to the conditions of its creation
through which it is actualised in situ, and to the use of language as this is to
be found in magazines of which the work forms part. It morphs into its dif-
ferent published versions (e.g. Aspen 5+6, 1967; Art-Language 1(1), 1969;
Interfunktionen 8, 1972, Studio International 944(183), 1972) but the
work can never be completed. As the artist explains in Schema’s introduc-
tion for Aspen, each of the component lines is “contingently determined
by every other number and percentage which itself in turn would be deter-
mined by the other numbers or percentages, ad infinitum”.
It should be noted that the Aspen 5+6 (1967) issue was a signifi-
cant critical and interdisciplinary endeavour.4 Conceived by the artist
4
My thanks to Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes for drawing my attention to this. Cf. Christa-
Maria Lerm-Hayes (ed.), Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, image and institutional
critique (forthcoming).
and critic Brian O’Doherty, who would become director of Visual and
Media Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1969 and edi-
tor of Art in America between 1971 and 1974, it took the form of a
box sized 8.25 × 8.25 × 2.125 inches and included essays, films, text-
based works and recordings of music pieces, interviews and readings.
Notable contributions were Roland Barthes’s seminal text The death
of the author, appearing for the first time in English and pre-dating its
French publication in 1968; musical scores by John Cage; and read-
ings of works by Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Marcel Duchamp
and Merce Cunningham. With the exception of the first, these were
read by their authors. The box also included O’Doherty’s Structural
Play #3, a script for a performance of a dialogue with varied inflection
(A: “WHAT do you want?; B: “What DO you want?”; A: “I don’t
KNOW”, B: “WHO does?” and so forth).
Graham’s Homes for America juxtaposes the language, layout and
glossy advertisement images of real estate (the most culturally impor-
tant market with regard to the “American dream”) in an art magazine
where one usually expects to find photographic reproductions of art and
relevant aesthetic discourse. The work appeared in different versions in
Arts Magazine (December 1966–January 1967) and Interfunktionen 7
(1971). As the story goes, the editor of Arts Magazine invited Graham
to submit a phototext based on his images of American homes previ-
ously shown as a slide projection at the exhibition Projected Art (1966,
Finch College, New York). This was not a strange request given the
tradition of documentary photography, photojournalism and works
such as Ed Rushca’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). What Graham
submitted, however, was quite different.
Combining photographs with seemingly factual language about
house size and wall colour, Homes for America challenges the market-
ing activities of the artworld and the function of the press vis-à-vis a
highly classed American society. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that
for the printed version for Arts Magazine, Graham’s images were radi-
cally reduced, priority was given to the descriptive text and an artistic
photograph by the acclaimed photographer Walker Evans was added.
Given that this was taken from Evans’s collection American Photographs
published by MoMA in 1938, this choice reinforced the link between
Graham’s work and “art proper”. More interesting parallels can be
drawn between Graham’s work and Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al
206 E. KALYVA
Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May

1, 1971 (1971). This work presented real estate information about cor-
porate slumlords and implicated the activities of the artworld. Shapolsky
et al was prepared for a one-man show at the Guggenheim, New York,
but its director Thomas Messer (1971) rejected it on the grounds that it
went against the museum’s established policies excluding active engage-
ment towards social and political ends. Haacke refused to withdraw the
work and the exhibition was cancelled (Reise 1971).
Graham (1985) explains that for a work to attain the status of “art”
and to be defined as having value, it has to be exhibited, written about
and reproduced as a photograph in an art magazine. The latter, Graham
continues, specialises in a “field” that replicates other social and economic
divisions and has a close connection to the advertisement industry spon-
soring it and shaping its “image”. The works by Graham discussed here
expose the administrative hierarchies and financial orientation of the art-
world and critically reflect on the role of the press in nominating and
marking something as art. Their use of language is not symptomatic but
integral to a critical engagement with the material and discursive support
systems of art. It conflates the limits between content and form as the
carrier of meaning, and brings to the surface the ideological and financial
stakes involved in the distinguishability of art.
Apart from the established art press, a new class of independent
magazines emerged at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. Relying
on personal networks, these created a new space to present artworks, art
information and criticism. Art-Language ran between 1969 and 1985 in
a small A5 print size and included essays on art theory, philosophy and
teaching, as well as new work and commentary. Philip Pilkington and
David Rushton, students at Coventry and members of Art & Language,
produced the magazine Statements (1970), which ran to two issues, in
relation to the revised Art Theory course that Atkinson, Balrwin and
Bainbridge were teaching. Pilkington and Rushton were also involved
with the Art & Language Press and published the magazine Analytical
Art (1971–72) with Kevin Lole. Other UK student magazines included
Number One (1971–72), published at the Newport College of Art where
Arnatt was teaching, Ratcatcher (Hull Regional College of Art, 1975–76),
Issue (Trent Polytechnic, 1976–79) and Ostrich (Royal College of Art,
London, 1976).
In the US, affiliated Art & Language members such as Sara Charlesworth,
Michael Corris, Kosuth, Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn published The Fox. It
ran with three issues between 1975 and 1976 when the group split up due
to internal differences. Their discussions on the matter appeared in the maga-
zine’s last issue, and some of its editors produced one issue of Red Herring in
1977. The first two issues of The Fox opened with the following statement:
If you are concerned with trying to reclaim art as an instrument of social

and cultural transformation, in exposing the domination of the culture/
administrative apparatus as well as art which indolently reflects that appara-
tus, you are urged to participate in this journal. Its editorial thrust is ideo-
logical: it aims at a contribution to the wider movement of social criticism/
transformation. (Our contribution will be on the art front but by no means
limited to the fixed context-closure of “art”.) We need a broad social base
in positive opposition to the ideological content and social relations pro-
duced by “official” culture. Those of you wishing to participate should send
correspondence to the editors, post office box 728, Canal Street Station,
New York City 10013.
Other New York magazines included Art-Rite (1973–78), run by Edit

Deak and Walter Robinson and distributed for free, and Avalanche
(1970–76) run by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar.
In Germany, Interfunktionen (1968–75) had sections for artists to
show their work in the form of images or texts, theory and art-related
information. Its regular contributors included Joseph Beuys, Marcel
Broodthaers and Buren. Benjamin Buchloh became editor of the last two
issues (1974 and 1975), after which the magazine went bankrupt, alleg-
edly in relation to the withdrawal of Broodthaers’s contribution when
Anselm Kiefer’s Occupations (1969) featured in the magazine’s last issue.
Other publications were Audio Arts (UK), +-0 (Belgium), Artitudes and
Art Vivant (France), Project (Poland), and Novina Nova and Moment
(Yugoslavia).
The page is never neutral. Townsend (1975, 170), the editor of Studio
International, noted “the obvious fact that art magazines are all too often
part of a publicity machine used by artists and dealers alike, and as such are
to be taken with large doses of salt”. In 1976, Studio International ’s issue
192(983) presented a critical review of art magazines. It published a sur-
vey that included titles from Australia, North America, Mexico and Hong
Kong among o thers and information regarding their audiences, financial
208 E. KALYVA
structure, role in the artworld and influence of the art market (Survey
1976). In the same issue, Peter Fuller (1976) argued that magazines are
mirrors through which the artworld reflects itself and are equally sealed off
from anything outside it; and John Tagg (1976), discussing the exhibition
The Art Press (1976, Victoria and Albert Museum) and its accompanying
publication, explained how the art magazine historically functions as an
essential component of the art market in terms of publicity and promo-
tion. The diversity of publications, therefore, reflects real social divisions.
As an administrator of information, the press shapes public consensus,
replicates socio-economic divisions and secures dominant power structures.
As a business model, it reflects and promotes the interests of the social
sub-group it caters for and by so doing manages to both differentiate its tar-
get audience and to market it. In the artworld, the management of the
target audience is further supported by traditional binaries such as high/low
culture and the supposed refined taste of the upper classes versus those of
the uneducated masses. The art press utilises this while at the same time also
streamlines commercial trends and attitudes towards artistic production. As
another framework for art, therefore, the art press can be understood along
three axes: advertisement of commercial activities and information for cura-
tors and collectors; its function as gatekeeper for art by validating artworks
and disseminating art criticism and exhibition reviews; and, combining the
two, searching for opportunities to create new market niches where it can
confer value on something (for example, a sketch or a note) and by doing
so also secure its own status.
Clive Phillpot, a journalist and later collector and curator specialised in art-
ists’ books, coined the term “wordworks”. The term first appeared in 1982 in
a special issue of Art Journal entitled Words and Wordworks, an anthology of
works of visual artists who worked with words. Elsewhere, Phillpot (1980) had
differentiated between textual work produced by visual artists and that pro-
duced by writers. This shows how the use of language was brought under
the scope of customary explorations into new artistic forms and means—a
scope that countervailed the critical extensions of this use in challenging the
roles of the art critic and the curator—and marketed accordingly. Re-branded
as “wordworks”, a variety of items such as notes, sketches, postcards, essays,
letters and magazines gradually found their way into private and public col-
lections, deluxe publications and dedicated art shows. Whereas the multiple
page had been used in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to challenge
institutional hierarchies, its critical edge and social outlook became fenced-in
by the late 1970s by new categorical (sub)classifications, corresponding dis-
cursive overlayers and market outlets.
5.4.2
Staging Exhibitions, Catalogues and Book Shows
There is an interesting story of how the Dutch collectors Herman and
Henriëtte van Eelen acquired Kawara’s postcard series I Got up May 1, 1970–
September 3, 1970 (1970) (a total of 126 pieces). Since Kawara was known
for only working with established museums, Herman van Eelen approached
the artist by showing him the already printed cards that the Japanese war-
dens allowed him to exchange with his mother during the Second World
War when they were both imprisoned in different camps in Indonesia. It
is said that Kawara sent his postcards to the collectors within 14 days (van
Eelen and van Eelen 2009).
The Dwan Gallery, New York was among the first to organise exhibitions
exclusively dedicated to language. Its Language shows ran between 1967 and
1970 and advocated for the supremacy of the idea and its linguistic expres-
sion. For the inaugural exhibition Language to be Looked at and/or Things to
be Read (3–28 June 1967), Robert Smithson (under the pseudonym Eton
Corrasable) argued that language operated between literal and metaphorical
signification and was shaped by the inadequacy of the context wherein it was
placed (press release, TDG Archives). With this in mind, Dwan’s exhibitions
initiated an interplay between the textual and the visual as part of an extended
field of artistic production. They brought together objects, paintings and
drawings from a range of artists that included, apart from emerging conceptual
artists, Duchamp, Magritte, Lichtenstein, Reinhardt and Flavin. Works by Art
& Language and Art-Language issues were also presented, but according to
Harrison and Orton (1982) these were not submitted by the group.
Let us compare this type of curatorial staging to the exhibitions organ-
ised by Lippard and Siegelaub. These engaged the exhibition space, the
catalogue and the relation between the visual and the textual in more
critical and self-reflective ways. Lippard’s exhibition Number 7 (18
May–15 June 1969, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York), a benefit for the
Art Workers’ Coalition, appeared to be empty. Works included Robert
Barry’s magnetic field, Carl Andre’s tiny piece of found wire lying on
the floor, Weiner’s pit in the wall from an air-rifle shot, Ian Wilson’s
oral communication, Stephen Katlenbach’s secret, Haacke’s air cur-
rents from a small fan by the door and Robert Huot’s existing shadows.
210 E. KALYVA
There were also books and notebooks placed on a table in the gallery’s

hallway (Lippard 1973, 100–101). Lippard’s touring shows 557,087 (5
September–5 October 1969, Seattle), 955,000 (13 January–8 February
1970, Vancouver) and 2,972,453 (December 1970, Buenos Aires),
with titles that corresponded to the population of these cities, extended
beyond the gallery space into the public space. The first took place at the
World’s Fair Pavilion and the second was spread over a 50-mile radius
around the city, while text-based works were displayed on mobile panels.
A few years later, Lippard’s c. 7,500 (16 November–16 December 1973,
CalArts, Valencia, California) concentrated on female conceptual artists
including Eleanor Antin, Hanne Darboven and Adrian Piper. It toured to
seven venues including London.
For these shows, Lippard had invited the participating artists to co-create
the exhibition catalogue, sending them empty postcards, sized 4 × 6 inches,
to fill with any kind of information or reflection they wanted. The cards
were consequently collected, photographed and left loose in a container
to consolidate the catalogue. There were 64 artists’ cards for the Seattle
show together with about 40 preliminary cards that included the title of the
exhibition, a list of participating artists, a forward note, a reference text by
Lippard, the schedule for the film screenings and a bibliography. Some 42
new cards and three more artists were added for the Vancouver show. In
contrast to the prestigious publications of metropolitan museums, Lippard
explicitly avoided nominating any overarching artistic category for the
exhibits. She also did not purport to frame their experimental and diverse
nature with her insights as the curator or imperative voice as an art critic.
The architecture of these exhibitions and the loose-leaf, non-hierarchical
format of their catalogue reflects Lippard’s critical disposition to democratic
participation in the arts. It also signalled a break with the organisational
logic of the art institution. Still, the press paid little attention to the critical
interests of the exhibitions and how these were articulated both by their
contents and their form. One review of the Seattle exhibition complained
that it was only about art and that it tried to solve the relation of the art-
object to the category of art by literature in a literary way (Plagens 1969).
In a way it did, but not with the aim to bypass or replace an old debate with
a new one, but precisely in order to displace and negotiate the object in
question.
Seth Siegelaub was another important figure who helped to reconceptualise
the exhibition space and the printed medium. According to Siegelaub (2001),
the printed medium was a more suitable means of interaction and dialogue
between artists and the public, and a more accessible alternative to the gallery
display. It required no specific place to be seen, was easier to organise and cost
very little. In January 1969, Siegelaub presented the exhibition January 5–31
1969 with Kosuth, Weiner, Huebler and Barry. As was the case with Lippard’s
shows and contrary to the Dwan Gallery’s exhibitions, Siegelaub’s title was as
factual and non-prescriptive as possible. The exhibition catalogue had a very
simple, DIY format of some ten sheets bound together with a plastic spiral.
Similarly, the exhibition space appeared to be almost empty.
However, Siegelaub’s show was staged in a particular way. It took place
in a rented office space in downtown Manhattan and was divided into two
parts. The first was set up as an “office” and included a desk with a secretary
(in this case, another conceptual artist, Adrian Piper), a sofa and a coffee
table. On it, Siegelaub placed exhibition catalogues in lieu of coffee table
magazines. The second area was the “exhibition” space that had a very
austere feel. The most noticeable thing on the wall was a series of clippings
from newspapers such as The New York Times and The Observer with the
classified ads that Kosuth had placed of his dictionary definitions from the
series Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) (1966–68). Barry’s contribution would
remain invisible and hidden from view. A photograph of his nylon mono-
filament installation was included in the exhibition catalogue and itemised
accordingly, but it is impossible to tell what was there, either on site or on
the page. Weiner’s contribution included what was listed in the catalogue as
“A 36″ x 36″ removal to the lathing or s upport wall of plaster or wallboard
from a wall. 1968. Collection: Mr Seth Siegelaub, N.Y.”
It is not clear which of the works were remade, which were relo-
cated and which were referred to for the occasion of the January show.
All works were specified in the exhibition catalogue as part of various
collections, while Siegelaub promoted the catalogue as the exhibition
(Catalogue of International General, in Seth Siegelaub 2016, 221–223).
If one wishes to determine a critical potential in this ambiguity, it is
important to methodologically separate between the inconclusiveness
of what there is to be looked at and the indefinability of what can be
looked at. While both approaches play out institutional and categorical
anxieties, only in the latter case can the work’s internal logic, which can
be understood as causing a second-degree abstraction, resist its particu-
lar manifestations. Weiner’s statements-instructions which were devel-
oped towards non-specific objects are a good example of this.
In other words, while such works can be understood as opening up the
enquiry of art by putting forward “dematerialised” or non-finite objects,
it is also important to consider how well they can sustain this enquiry, and
to what extent they rely on curatorial or narratological mystifications to
212 E. KALYVA
carry that enquiry in their stead. Far from having a neutral setting, the
January show played out the financial interests that dominate the artworld
in a business office filled with the striking absence of works as finite, visible
or aesthetically “pleasing” objects. But there is a certain degree of irony
in how this endeavour relied on an entrepreneurial outlook to stage this
ambiguity.
Perhaps this can be better understood in conjunction with other activities
by Siegelaub in the early 1970s. In 1971, Siegelaub drafted “The Artist’s
Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement”. This notably secured that
the artist would benefit from the work’s consequent sales at a rate of 15%
for the remainder of his or her life and the life of a surviving spouse, plus 21
years. It moreover provided a record of ownership, the right to be notified
when the work is to be exhibited and be consulted if repairs become neces-
sary, as well as the right to borrow the work for two months every five years.
As the agreement clarified, “the artist would maintain aesthetic control only
for his/her lifetime” while the recipient would be assured that the work was
used “in harmony with the artist’s intentions”. The agreement was translated
into German, French and Italian and used by artists (Haacke, Buren, Andre),
dealers (Konrad Fischer) and collectors (Herman Daled). It also generated
discussion and criticism particularly because of the parallels it created between
art and the real estate business (cf. Seth Siegelaub 2016, 226–235).
In 1970, Siegelaub founded his publishing house, International General.
Through it, he made available exhibition catalogues such as Lippard’s
557,087/955,000 combined catalogue and the book version of Studio
International’s 1970 summer exhibition, as well as artists’ books such as
Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966; reprint 1969) and Andre’s
Seven Books of Poetry (1969). The Press also allowed Siegelaub to further
explore the idea of the catalogue as the exhibition itself. While Siegelaub’s
contribution was important, the outcome of his ventures was often inadver-
tent. Consider, for example, the catalogue-exhibition March 1969 (1969).
It had a calendar format and each invited artist was asked to contribute to
a specified date page. The entries were not consistent, many pages were left
blank and it is not clear to what extent some of the entries (for example,
descriptions of projects or correspondence with Siegelaub) were selected by
the artists or the curator. Another project was what came to be generally
known as Xerox Book (1968). In a thick format, this book had no cover title
but only the surnames of the participating artists (Andre, Barry, Huebler,
Kosuth, LeWitt, Morris and Weiner) on the spine together with the signa-
ture “Siegelaub/Wendler N.Y.” The project allowed 25 pages to each of its
invited artists. The first edition of December 1968 ran to 1,000 copies and
included a copyright note. According to Siegelaub (1999), the aim of this

project was to propose a situation, standardise the conditions of production
in terms of format and space, and allow the resulting differences in each
artist’s project or work to “be precisely what the artist’s work was about”.
Interestingly, the book was not xeroxed because that process was very expen-
sive at the time; instead, it was produced through regular paper offprints.
This momentum, typical at the time of conceptual art, to stage the page
was also carried over to other publications by Siegelaub such as Weiner’s
Statements (1968)—a book that was equally advertised as an “exhibition”
(“Catalogue of International General”, Seth Siegelaub 2016, 221).
Since then, Siegelaub’s activities have been institutionally sanctioned and
re-framed. His rights agreement together with correspondence with artists,
interviews and artworks for which the agreement was used such as Haacke’s
Condensation Cube (1962–65) were displayed for the exhibition “The Artist’s
Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” von Seth Siegelaub und Bob
Projansky (1998, Salzburger Kunstverein). More recently, for the retrospective
Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art (12 December 2015–17 April 2016,
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), the curators reconstructed the January show
rooms inside the museum’s room, re-made the works and added archival
image strips, which were framed and mounted on the partition walls.
If Siegelaub’s rhetoric relied on how conceptual artworks treated their sub-
ject matter, others relied on Siegelaub. Athena Spear (1970), organiser of an
exhibition in Oberlin, Ohio argued that the best way to absorb the new com-
plex thoughts of the exhibited material, which would normally “[belong] to
publications and libraries”, was to follow the attitude of “the pioneering art
dealer Seth Siegelaub [where] exhibitions of idea art can consist only of their
catalogues”. Entitled Art in the Mind (17 April–12 May 1970), this c atalogue
was set on a table in an otherwise empty room; the prerequisite of participa-
tion for the invited artists was works that could adequately be described on
a typewriter-size paper and xeroxed in any number of copies (press release,
AMAM Archives). As a newspaper review described it, this was “a kind of
exhibition that solves everybody’s problems—yours, mine, the museum’s, and
the artist’s” (Bruner 1972).
The catalogue contained different ideas and formats of presentation.
Vito Acconci described his Goal Project which aspired to have three stu-
dents from the New York School of Visual Arts to be mentioned in John
Perrault’s column for Village Voice, and George Brecht’s entry was a
reproduction of his letter to Spear suggesting the idea of cutting the city
of Oberlin loose to freely float in the ocean. On the other hand, Piper’s
Context # 6 (1970) actively engaged its context, medium and audience.
214 E. KALYVA
Rather than simply proclaiming a grand idea or describing an internalised

and self-isolating stream of thought, the instructions to the reader read:
I AM COLLECTING INFORMATION. You are requested to: 1) write,

draw, or otherwise indicate any information suggested by the above state-
ment on the following pages. 2) detach pages at perforation and mail to
Adrian Piper 117 Hester St. New York, N.Y. 10002.
Three empty pages with the header “Context #6” and a dotted line along
the left margin followed. Of course, since the catalogue constituted the
exhibition, the setting itself precluded the public’s collaboration.
This series of examples demonstrates different tendencies and interests
in the use of language, as well as collaborations and networks. It also shows
recurring themes that were executed in better or less effective ways. The
contemporary reader must therefore consider how this plurality of voices
and repetition of ideas affect the analysis of conceptual art. Certainly, the
American modernist art discourse was not the only thing intercepting its
critical voice. The momentum that conceptual art gained from its popular-
ity did so, too.
In London, Lisson Gallery’s Wall Show (10 December 1970–3 January
1971) applied the idea of a structural setting of an exhibition and a “mat-
ter of fact” presentation. Participating artists were sent the blueprints of
the gallery space and invited to select one of the gallery walls in order to
make an on-site work. They were also invited to fill in the pages of the
exhibition catalogue that were allocated to them, and which would be
presented without any additional introduction. One of the exhibits was
a typical wall drawing after LeWitt’s instructions. The relevant entry in
the catalogue was a text by James Faure-Walker, who executed the work
since, as the note clarified, the organisers were not able to secure material
from LeWitt in time. Another point of interest was Weiner’s contribution
“A removal to the lathing or support wall of plaster or wall board from a
wall”. As the gallery director Nicholas Logsdail (2011) recalls, the organ-
isers carried out the task by taking the whole partition wall down. This is
quite similar to what Weiner had suggested for Siegelaub’s January 5–31
1969 exhibition. In London, however, Weiner placed the work in “public
freehold”—in other words, not owned by anyone.
At the Nigel Greenwood Gallery, the idea of setting up an exhibition that
was constituted by responses to instructions that in turn formed a publica-
tion was presented as such. David Lamelas’s Publication (23 November–6
December 1970) displayed the responses by artists and c ritics to a set of
statements that Lamelas had sent them and which were produced in book
form in a run of 1,000 copies (the first 100 copies were numbered and
signed). The artist’s instructions included a disclaimer:
1. Use of oral and written language as an Art Form.

2. Language can be considered as an Art Form.
3. Language cannot be considered as an Art Form.
These statements were given to the previous list of artists and critics for
consideration. Their responses are published in this book, which constitutes
the form of the work, presented first in Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd London,
between the 23rd of November and the 6th of December 1970. I do not
take part in the responses to the statements since, as a receiver of all the
contributions, my reference is prejudiced. My choice of the three statements
does not imply agreement or disagreement with any of the three statements.
David Lamelas
September 1970, London.
For her contribution, Lippard addressed the shifting roles of artists, cura-
tors and critics and the importance of context. Being equally critical,
Barbara Reise drew attention to the popular belief according to which if
one used oral or written language, that meant that the work produced had
better chances of being thought of as “art”.
One of the reasons behind this, as we have seen so far, was the market-
ability of the page as “the new thing”. Commercial galleries, art publications
and artists benefited from this. Another reason was the tradition of the art-
ist’s book. In 1972, Nigel Greenwood presented the survey exhibition Book
as Artwork 1960/1972 (20 September–14 October 1972), a collaboration
between Lynda Morris and Celant based on the latter’s list of about 80 art-
ists’ publications previously published in Data 1(1) (1970). The Greenwood
catalogue reached a bibliography of 250; items were also available for sale.
In the same period, Harrison was asked to document in a collection
and organise a touring exhibition of this new conceptual art in Britain
for the Circulation Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London. The condition was that the exhibits fit in a single flat frame. For
Harrison, since the purpose was principally to inform, it was not necessary
that the works had the status of “originals” and they could be in the form
of typescripts, photographs and xeroxed copies. Each artist was to be
given £100 and it seems that Atkinson and Baldwin, LeWitt and Kawara
had already sent their work to Harrison but unfortunately the exhibi-
tion was not realised (Harrison 2008; Tate Archives TGA 839/1/4).
216 E. KALYVA
A few years later, the Victoria and Albert Museum presented The Art Press
(1976) and The Open and Closed Book: Contemporary Book Arts (1979).
The activities of the Tate, another government-funded gallery, and its acqui-
sitions of text-based works have been previously discussed (cf. Seven Exhibitions
(1970) and Burgin’s Room (1970) bought in 1973). Another important gate-
keeper was the Arts Council. Following the exhibition Beyond Painting and
Sculpture (1973, touring), which included text-based work by Arnatt and a
photograph-and-text series by Burgin, Michael Compton organised the tour-
ing exhibition Art as Thought Process in 1974. Compton, who had previously
organised the Hayward’s The New Art (1972), situated the interest of this exhi-
bition in the process by which art was made rather than the finished object. He
argued that the value of such art, which included text-based works by Burgin
and Art & Language, was that it presented to the viewer both the subject (or
idea) and the artwork in such a way that they interpreted each other (Compton
1974, 5). In 1976, the Council supported the touring exhibition Artists’ Books
(1976) organised by Martin Attwood and Phillpot, who would later coin the
term “wordworks”. The same year, the Arts Council announced the availabil-
ity of funds to encourage publishing projects related to the visual arts. Similar
changes took place across the Atlantic, where the National Endowment for
the Arts began to support conceptual, video and performance art under the
directorship of O’Doherty.
Attwood also prepared the touring exhibition Artists Bookworks (1975) for
the British Council. It counted 120 books, pamphlets, catalogues, periodi-
cals and anthologies that were cross-referenced and arranged on shelves and
partition walls. This show functioned at two levels. It was aligned with the
Council’s mission to promote knowledge of the English language and British
literature internationally, and promoted the book as an art form apart from
being a means of communication (Artists Bookworks 1975). The exhibition
catalogue also featured a critical essay by Lynda Morris on the use of language
in art, which specifically considered the work of Art & Language. For his part,
Attwood differentiated between the accessory function of the exhibition cata-
logue and the works on display (Fig. 5.3). This position is quite telling of the
difference between the attitudes and practices of public bodies towards new
artistic developments and those of private galleries.
By the end of the decade, the interest in artists’ books had spread from
Kassel, where Documenta 6 (24 June–2 October 1977) included a dedi-
cated section for artists’ books, to Los Angeles and the exhibition Artwords
and Bookworks (1978, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art), which
showed works by some 600 contributors and later toured the country.
Fig. 5.3 Installation view of the touring exhibition Artists’ Bookworks (1975)
(© The British Council)
Around this time, Art & Language became concerned with the prevailing
forms of representation within the artworld of the connections between art,
society and politics. A particular concern, Harrison (1987) explains, was a
“semio-art” or “university art” of image and text conjunctions: while these
conjunctions were represented as subversive and demystifactory, the intellec-
tual world in which they were produced and consumed existed to ratify pre-
cisely such forms of conjunction. Art and Language’s practice returned to the
use of images and the significance and meaning claimed for pictures.
As for the book, it is true that it was part of the avant-garde movements
of the early twentieth century: a new artistic means which manipulated visual
form, structure, verbal interplay and narrative sequence, and which sought
to engage the wider socio-political context as a multiple in circulation. As
such, Johanna Drucker (1995) explains, artists’ books were usually associ-
ated with independent publishing and politically engaged artists. To advance
its critique, therefore, the artist’s book must be paradigmatically inserted in
the social sphere. On the contrary, its celebratory isolation in the art world
can only neutralise this potential. Indeed, as Lippard (1985) explains with
reference to the artistic production of the sixties, while the interest in artists’
218 E. KALYVA
books as mass-reproduced, potentially “democratic” works of art rather than

“one-of-a-kind” art objects in book form formed part of a broad, if naive,
quasi-political resistance to the extreme commodification of artworks, the
artist’s book was also conspicuously consumed as a distinctly luxury item. In
the end, it seems that the “problem” of conceptual art’s use of language was
resolved in a literal way. In typical market behaviour, the e nd-product of a
critical process—the juxtaposition of the visual and the textual which sought
to challenge the art-object and its enclosure in elitist art institutions—was
elevated to an autonomous (art) status.
5.5 Closing Remarks

Borrowing from Marx, Buren (1968) argues that “art has changed 100
times, if not more […] and since the foundation remains untouched,
obviously nothing is fundamentally changed”. So, is there a difference
between all the sites that language has occupied? And who, or what,
exactly “failed”?
The difference has to do with the work, its context and reception.
Juxtaposing language in a visual art context in order to destabilise the object
in question as well as the attitudes and ideologies within that context cre-
ates an antithesis. In critically engaged works, this antithesis is instrumental:
it rehearses categorical separations and prevalent ideological binaries, but not
in order to affirm them. Rather, this is in order to demonstrate how these can
be negated. Likewise, conceptual art made it possible that not only texts but
also artists’ books and magazines be admitted in art galleries and their display,
albeit often in glass cabinets, may provide contextual information about a
range of activities that did not stand in isolation. However, once such cate-
gorical ambiguities could be identified, classified and marketed, things quickly
returned to business as usual: the shifting of the boundaries between the work
of art proper and auxiliary work became part of an institutional discourse, and
a matter of reclassification and re-evaluation of a corpus of items.
For this reason, and faced with shifting trends and frameworks regarding
art production and management, any transgression performed by the work
must resonate beyond its own body. Critically engaged conceptual art prac-
tices established a dialectical relationship between the work and the world and
between art and criticism, as well as between the object in question and the
writing of its history. This has opened up space for the reconsideration of the
predominance of modernism’s protocols and ideological premises regarding

the disinterested art-object. It also made possible the reconsideration of the
essentialist tradition and the place that art, including conceptual art, occupies
in the artworld. To put it another way, conceptual art offered a way of under-
standing the function of art amidst competing interests and tensions.
Today, language is part of an artist’s toolbox. Works acquired by the archives
and libraries of museums in the early 1970s now pass into art collections—
e.g. Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction (1971) and I Have Decided to Go to
the Tate Gallery Next Friday (1971), and Art & Language’s 22 Sentences: The
French Army 1968) and Hot, Warm, Cool, Cold (1967), which were trans-
ferred to the Tate’s main collection in 2010 and 2011—while exhibitions
keep reframing both the act and its proper name. In this process of telling and
re-telling, the loan rhetoric of conceptual art becomes both part of the story
and a critical tool in understanding it.
The rhetorical shifts, conceptual oppositions and conditional proposi-
tions of conceptual art create a space of ambiguity in order to test the
limits of the categorical separations that sustained it as “art”. When caught
in categorical ambiguity, there are three courses of action one can take:
resolve it by incorporating the problematic case into an existing canon;
revise that canon (even radically, to the point of replacing it); or leave
that ambiguity unresolved and manipulate different, and perhaps mutu-
ally exclusive, canons as appropriate (Wartofsky 1975). Here, the critical
task is to show how the dominance of style hides or mystifies the actual
conditions that determine its dominance. In other words, the relations
across experience, knowledge and consciousness are formulated according
to set parameters and hierarchies. To understand the mechanisms of these
hierarchies is to understand how their enabling categories, as historical
constructs, and their corresponding practices are defined and maintained.
Juxtaposition helps rearticulate the ontological question regarding the (un)
distinguishability of art as an enquiry into the prioritisation of the contexts of
interpretation. It demonstrates how the ontological question regarding the
nature of art is not a problem exclusively internal to the category of art but
becomes a methodological problem. It may be that the market investment in
the work’s physical form threatens to override the dialectics of its experience,
as the story of conceptual art shows. However, there is a pertinent question
that Foucault (1977 [1969]) reminds us in his discussion of the status of the
author: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” To answer this, one
must start from context, not metaphysics.
220 E. KALYVA
Art’s sociability has become central in recent debates. Too often, the
concept of “relational aesthetics” has been advanced as a post-modernistic
celebration of fluidity through which art stages social relations. In Nicolas
Bourriaud’s (2002) account, the “relational” is used descriptively as in “an
aesthetics of relations”, the same way “relational procedures” are proce-
dures of relations and “relational art” refers to art that depicts relations. In
terms of the latter, Claire Bishop (2004) warns us that an unproblematic
staging of social environments enacts and therefore produces dominant
power structures, while art risks becoming self-congratulatory enter-
tainment. In terms of the former, Osborne (2004) draws attention to a
habitual conflation of the aesthetic with aesthetics, and to the historical-
ontological theory of art of Jena Romanticism that he sees contemporary
art, as post-conceptual art, to be actualising. For Osborne:
the legitimation crisis of art is a sign of the continuing, if problematic, criti-

cality of contemporary art. It is a sign of the fact that art’s authority and
critical function remains a problem within contemporary culture, a problem
for which art’s continuing if uncertain metaphysical dimension is a concep-
tual condition. (2004, 654)
To begin understanding this problem, let us recall that relocation is

different to displacement. Whereas relocation can only go as far as to sup-
port a singular illusion of breaking away from tradition, displacement, if
employed critically, can remain open to a dialectical manipulation of the
relative status of that tradition in context, aiming to change that context.
A work that manipulates a loan rhetoric can engage such shifting contexts,
especially if the limits of its descriptive capacity meet the limits of its per-
formativity with absurdity or, more critically, with irony. Juxtaposition
can stage and manipulate this aporia of meaning in a space bogged down
by tradition wherein different hierarchies of representation and evalua-
tion operate. However, it is not only the experience of art that is wrapped
in this discursive field but also the writing of its story. For this reason, one
has to be wary of the rhetorical aesthetisation of the categories to which
art is ascribed, whether these categories are autonomous, interdisciplin-
ary or meta-.
The critical use of language by conceptual art practices contributes
to our understanding of the activity of producing and theorising art in
three ways. It addresses relations across the tropes of art, criticism and his-
tory, and how the social and discursive spaces within which these operate
become mystified and misrepresented. It implicates how scholarship

normalises the work’s experience, function and history. Finally, it shows
how the value of “art” and “criticism” and the divides between “theory”
and “practice” shift, and how these shifts are caused and organised by the
institution of art and its markets.
References
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CHAPTER 6
Conclusions
Conceptual art finds itself in a paradoxical position. Both at the time of the
event and in the process of writing its history, the language of conceptual art
indicates a polyphony of interests. One such interest is the critical engage-
ment with art, its experience and function, and the institutional, ideologi-
cal and discursive frameworks that constitute them. Historically, this critical
focus destabilised the modernist art discourse, and forms part of conceptual
art’s contribution to both artistic production and criticism. As a mode of
interrogating prevalent systems of representation and theorisation, concep-
tual art’s critical strategies can be found in contemporary art and in particu-
lar what has been identified as social practice. In the form of multimodal
engagement with spatial or temporal extensions, didactic or participatory
events, investigation, documentation and performance, such practices inter-
rogate the politics of the artworld and respond to societal concerns. Another
interest that the story of conceptual art embodies is the attention to the
primacy of the idea and its relation to perception and cognition. Historically,
this was assimilated with the modernist art pursuit of even more refined art
forms to safeguard the value of the unmediated aesthetic experience. In the
contemporary artworld, the primacy of the idea over execution or outcome
too often becomes a means by which to legitimise one’s claims, be it the
claims of the artist, the critic or the curator.
In terms of conceptual art as a category, its discussion across art criticism,
history and philosophy can be divided into three broad layers: conceptual
art’s relation to modernism and whether it successfully challenged or

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5_6
226 E. KALYVA
failed to disable the latter’s protocols and the aesthetic dimension of art;
conceptual art and modernism in relation to the post-conceptual, the
post-modern and the global and/or hegemonic; and the ontological and
institutional status of conceptual art as a historical movement whose mate-
riality and relation to theory are constantly reconfigured.
Amidst this plurality of voices, the task of this book has been to deter-
mine the critical and social dimensions of conceptual art. It has demonstrated
the use of image and text juxtapositions as a critical strategy for staging a
categorical ambiguity in order to destabilise what is understood, or what
can be understood, as the object in question. Through a dynamic process
of recontextualisation, dislocation and reframing, conceptual art challenged
the ideological and market divisions across the artist as the producer, the
critic as the qualifying expert and the viewer as the passive consumer. It self-
reflectively contested the value placed on the mute language of aesthetic sen-
sibility disinterested in political or social concerns, and it paradigmatically did
so in capitalist societies that mass-produced and “exported” culture, as well
as in societies that were subjected to such cultural, and political, hegemony.
Thus conceptual art demonstrated the space of art as a social space: a space
of representation of values and ideological division but also a space within
which power structures and social hierarchies operate and become actualised.
The central premise in this interdisciplinary discussion has been that mean-
ing-making is a social activity: it is a shared activity and part of social interac-
tion, it shapes and realises social structures, and is conditioned by frameworks
of interpretation and evaluation. Critically engaged conceptual art brought
into focus the context of art and the enabling conditions of its communica-
tion within a wider system of reference. It interrogated different viewing and
reading regimes, habits and expectations, and created sites of ambiguity and
tension. This opened up a space of enquiry and drew attention to certain,
still prevalent, antitheses, or binary oppositions, on which art’s separability is
established. As a mode of critical engagement with the nature and function of
art, this has helped reframe an ontological question regarding the nature of art
as a methodological problem that must be considered in context: the mate-
rial, discursive, institutional and historical context. In other words, conceptual
art made it possible to methodologically differentiate between the interpreta-
tion and the evaluation of art—something that traditional aesthetic theories
categorically resisted. In turn, this has made it possible to separate between
the particular aesthetic investments in art that conceptual art sought to chal-
lenge, and how the work’s own material presence and presentation contribute
to its meaning. Furthermore, conceptual art drew attention to the shift-
ing frameworks of apprehension, evaluation and classification under which
CONCLUSIONS 227
its meaning and experience was, and still is, subjected. Amidst competing
interests and historiographical tropes, it demonstrated the dialectical relation-
ship between the work and the world, between art and criticism, and between
the object in question and the writing of history.
The aim of this book has been to understand these operations and their
mechanisms. It has sought to recuperate conceptual art’s critical and social
dimension from a narrow focus on tautological or anti-aesthetic claims,
and to relocate it amidst the processes that institutionalise and normalise
its experience. In parallel, by using the case of conceptual art, this book
has aimed to specify the critical potential and social function of art as a
transformative social praxis: an activity that reflects upon the world and
seeks to change it, and that at the same time critically reflects upon its own
condition and relation to that world.
Examples have been taken from different geo-political sites. Establishing
a method of critical analysis, the frameworks this book proposes can be
applied in the examination of the relation between art and politics in dif-
ferent and often shifting geo-political and institutional contexts. In terms
of conceptual art practices not covered by this book and of practices that
juxtaposed images and texts from the same period, other historical case
studies can be found in Northern Ireland, which formed an important
socio-political context for cultural and political activities in the UK; other
European countries and Eastern European countries especially Yugoslavia
and the former Soviet Union; and other Central and Latin American coun-
tries such as Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. In terms of applying the
proposed methodology in a more contemporary context, one can consider
the creative-activist participation in social mobilisation such as the global
justice and the Occupy movements at the turn of the millennium, and
anti-austerity and neo-imperial warfare demonstrations. A particular inter-
est for image and text studies and the sociology and communication of art
is what has been described as a guerrilla of communication. Independently
of whether one examines historical or contemporary cases, it is important
to differentiate between what an act could mean and what it means within
specific interpretive communities. One must interrogate the discursive
frameworks that envelop the act, as well as the materiality of the act’s pres-
ence as the locus of interaction and critique in the space that it occupies.
To return to the starting question of this book: How have conceptual
art practices and the use of language changed the ways we do, talk about
and theorise art? There have been different genealogies of thought
and methodological and philosophical concerns regarding the relation
between art and language. A predominant one has been the essentialist
228 E. KALYVA
tradition and the understanding of art as a universal language of expression

and emotions where the aesthetic experience offers a particular type of
knowledge. Another way of doing things is to examine the historical
category of “art”, and the different discourses and ideologies which
structure its meaning and experience. This interest found in analytic phi-
losophy and Marxist critical thinking fuelled a parallel reconsideration
of art and language (or of culture and communication more generally).
This departed from the demand that language, and art, be universally
accountable for some moral truth, and turned attention to the mecha-
nisms that confer value, guide recognition and maintain hierarchies of
meaning. This background offered conceptual artists the theoretical
frameworks and methodological tools to contest the ideological premises
of modernism (Chapter 2).
With this in mind, the critical use of image and text juxtapositions in
conceptual art can be examined in different ways. One is to consider the
work’s performative gesture, and how it negotiates the assumptions that
support its communication in different physical and discursive contexts. By
using photographs, objects, installations, instructions and enactments, the
work can convey its critical message through the gaps in the institutional
discourse that it creates, and by inverting the mediation of reality. This
interplay must be supported by the work both discursively and structurally
if it is to survive the normalisation of its experience, which documentation
and the construction of the archive impose (Chapter 3).
A second method of analysis is to investigate the logico-semantic relations
between a work’s textual and visual components, and between the work and
its context, particularly in terms of its modes of signification and intertextual
references. This allows us to understand how the work structures meaning,
and how it manipulates different means and voices in order to create a site of
tension. As a critical strategy, this aimed to expose prevalent ideologies within
the cultural sphere and spectatorial desires, and to contest the isolation of art
from social life. One should also pay attention to how the realisation of the
work and its material presence contribute to its meaning. This contextual
dependence can be tested by considering the relocation and transposition of
works to different environments (Chapter 4).
Finally, one cannot ignore the discursive field that is created by and
around the work. To challenge and expose this, the work can manipulate
a loan rhetoric and create instances of irony where one cannot tell between
figural and literal meaning. By staging ambiguity and by re-negotiating
its own categorical limits, the work can distort the overlapping frames
of reference that define and constitute it. This allows us to understand,
and differentiate between, the critical potential of an act and the effects
CONCLUSIONS 229
of the processes of its institutionalisation and marketing in the telling and

re-telling of the story of conceptual art (Chapter 5).
The inscription of the space of artistic production within the public sphere
as part of or overlapping with other social practices entails the appropriation
of activities from such other practices by the artistic practice that initiated the
act. In their less critical versions, conceptual artworks sought to overcome
the conceptual and methodological difficulties this entails by falling back to
an ontological premise regarding the work (its concept or idea) and the phe-
nomenology of its experience. As such, they might have created instances of
dissonance or logical inconclusiveness, but they failed to dialectically negoti-
ate the conditions of their classification, apprehension and communication.
For this reason, they remained limited to them. In the case of more critically
engaged works, these initiated a self-reflective mode of exposing the enabling
mechanisms and ideological value systems that supported them as such. This
was not done from a external sphere of criticism but rather through the work
at the cost of its own discursive stability. By doing so, conceptual art demon-
strated that the work of art is not a neutral site but one that is inscribed by
ideologies and structured by hierarchies of meaning.
For a critically engaged artistic practice, it is important that it resist affir-
matively (re)producing the systems, structures and hierarchies that it seeks
to challenge—that is, that it resist becoming permanently inscribed in the
discursive apparatuses that it interrogates. To put it in terms more relevant
to the historical moment of conceptual art, this critical task does not consist
of simply enlisting non-painterly or non-sculptural means. Rather, it con-
sists of finding those procedural means that enable the creation of some-
thing that cannot be easily assimilated by the culture industry. Contrary to
an understanding of mass culture as spontaneously arising from the masses,
Theodor Adorno (1975 [1967]) has identified the culture industry as inte-
grating consumers from above. Adorno particularly draws attention to how
the interests of the cultural industry have become objectified in its ideology,
and maintains that cultural entities are no longer to be understood as also
commodities. Rather, they are to be understood as commodities through
and through, governed by the principle of their realisation as value.
How can one proceed? In its examination of conceptual art, this book has
made a tentative distinction between the conceptual space of reflection and
analysis, which is based on different modes of classification and recognition,
and the empirical space of direct encounters and social experience. It is across
this distinction that discursive regimes of knowledge and dominant ideolo-
gies operate and, as conceptual art has shown, exposing what is at stake by
230 E. KALYVA
their separability is part of art’s critical potential. To put it differently, the

critical space is a disturbing space within which the accorded agreement
which separates different cultural and social activities can be exposed as an
ideological operation.
The case of conceptual art also permits us to reflect on how the telling
of the story becomes mystified by the totalising effect of discovery. It is an
apt example of how the categories of “art” and “knowledge” themselves
become institutionalised and incorporated into an ever-expanding market.
Yet the act of looking is always preconditioned. It is already negotiated
from a contemporary positioning vis-à-vis an appropriately evaluated and
respective past in a convenient reiteration which also legitimises an equally
historical present. Second, the act of looking is determined by the overlap-
ping discursive fields of interpretation that shape it. For this reason, choos-
ing an adequate frame of reference is both a methodological problem, in
terms of finding appropriate methods of analysis with respect to the case at
hand, and an epistemological one since how one chooses to tell the story
furnishes a historical activity with additional meaning. Separating the two
and understanding the structuration of meaning and the accumulation of
value is a critical requirement of both art and (its) criticism.
6.1 The State of Affairs Today

Context is a mutable construct. Victor Burgin (1984) argues that conceptual
art allowed the possibility of the absence of “presence” and thus the possibility
of change. Change not only concerns spectatorial habits and artistic interests.
It also concerns the hierarchical systems and categorical divisions that define
what is “acceptable” and maintain the demands that are placed both on the
category of art and on the object of art. This means that the critical currency of
an act must also be considered in its subsequent historical development. If, in
the early twentieth century, Duchampian nominalism showed the contingency
of classification, the presence of the ready-made had lost its power of estrange-
ment by the time of conceptual art. Today, in the era of “post-conceptualist”
art and the global (art) market, the use of language by art has become as indis-
tinguishable as any other of its gestures. Moreover, from the current stand-
point of advanced capitalism, it has become increasingly common to celebrate
a post-modernistic collapse of the divide between reality and representation.
This nurtures a culture of “everything goes” where the fluidity of meaning
across trans-categorical shifts make it categorically impossible to locate
any prevailing organisational structures. However, as this book has specified,
CONCLUSIONS 231
since reading and viewing require objects, one must consider how these become
materially established, ideologically sanctioned and institutionally supported.
In other words, one must acknowledge how specific operations configure and
guard a set meaning for both those activities and their corresponding objects.
Other conditions that have changed since the time of conceptual art are
the institutional positions of the critic and the artist. These evolve histori-
cally, as does what is understood as practice, theory and, more recently,
the practice of theory. Reconsiderations include the function of the critic
and of criticism since the Enlightenment, the currency of the aesthetic
judgement, the systematic structures of knowledge and the (failed) auton-
omy of the artwork (Newman 2008). Likewise, attention has turned to
the processes through which capitalism co-opts criticism and the agency
and professional status of the latter; and to the conceptualisation of more
performative critical registers for doing criticism with the work (Butt
2005). Still, one should be careful not to mystify criticism’s own rhetorical
aspirations. If the modernist critic purported to let the work speak qua his
or her own qualifying interpretation, the intellectual has equally become
the new master of truth and justice, and the new representative of the
universal (Foucault 1997).
A plurality of voices not only characterises conceptual art or the telling
of its stories, but is the condition, one might say, of the “now” of critique.
An interdisciplinary study can keep the prejudice that Wittgenstein (1953)
has long detected in check: the prejudice against looking at the particular-
ity of the case at hand in a state of affairs, and insisting on guessing at some
universal truth or moral condition. To overcome this, the rigorous exami-
nation of the object in question must also consider that which falls outside
institutional preferences. To an extent, as conceptual art reminds us, this
amounts to pulling the carpet from under one’s feet. Yet no amount of
self-criticism can save the day as long as it is used to camouflage the resis-
tance to change. Echoing Karl Marx, we strive only to interpret the world
in various ways; the point is to change it.1
For its part, research in the humanities has become a financial enterprise
driven by the market demand for what has been branded, after the sciences, as
“applicable” findings. This has capacitated further investment in the “new”,
and reinforces the identified relation of the university discourse of excellence
and research to globalisation and consumerist ideology (Readings 1996).
1
Marx’s (1938 [1845–46]) 11th thesis on Feuerbach reads: “Philosophers have hitherto
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.
232 E. KALYVA
If conceptual art upset the establishment by interrogating the conception of

“studio work” and the production of “tangible objects” and by advancing
“theory” or “research” as “art”, we must closely examine the institutional
benefits that practice-led academic PhD programmes offer. The produc-
tion of tangible objects is still required. The difference is that by these
programmes, artists are reclassified as researchers and artworks as research
outputs. Notwithstanding the critical and self-critical potential that art and
art education have in an academic setting, it is imperative to scrutinise how
the notions of creativity and artistic genius have been re-evaluated by new
sets of criteria for measuring and funding performativity; and how the mar-
ket valorisation and legitimation of art criticism in the circulation of art
are still tested by the relation between artistic practice and theoretical work
(Reiber 2007; Berland et al. 1996).
Conceptual art can be understood as placing a permanent question mark
next to the word “art”. This implicates not only metaphysical but also
material interests. Just over a century ago, Vladimir Lenin (1973 [1908])
explained that art’s purpose is to bring to the surface the underlying social
contradictions and the essentially antagonistic nature of capitalist society.
Today, in the neoliberal multiplicity some call democracy, art must not only
reproach but most importantly bring to the surface the impossibility of
escaping its essential contradiction: that no matter its negotiation, as long as
art remains a commodity, its exchange value ascertains the need for a culture
industry. To put it differently, it may well be that the ways by which culture
and its products are organised have changed since the time of conceptual
art. But as long as art remains a curatorial practice, the institutional space
that art occupies will still take its cue from the market. This may limit art’s
capacity to instigate social change, but hopefully not the idea(l)s behind it.
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Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 162, 164, 165, 172, 180, 195–7,

I Encuentro Nacional de Arte de 200, 226, 229
Vanguardia (1968) exhibition, archive, 11, 44, 45, 71, 75–80, 104,
86, 156 148, 167, 219
Argentine Anticommunist Alliance
(Triple A), 155
A Arnatt, Keith
Adorno, Theodor, 81, 146, 229 An Exhibition of the Duration of the
aesthetics Exhibition (1970) exhibition,
aesthetic apprehension, 30, 44 53, 139, 202
aesthetic experience, 5, 16, 37, 43, An Institutional Fact (1972), 122
88, 90, 92, 112, 132, 179, Art and Egocentricity—A
191, 199, 225, 228 Perlocutionary Act? (1971),
aesthetic norms, 181, 197, 199 51, 56, 122, 131
aesthetic object, 18, 24 Art as an Act of Retraction (1971),
Algerian War of Independence, 26, 80 10, 44, 51–68, 103, 219
Althusser, Louis, 5, 93 Art & Project Bulletin no. 23
analytic philosophy, 4, 8, 10, 16, 17, (1970), 202
50, 111, 113, 141 Is it Possible for Me to Do Nothing as
Andre, Carl, 209, 212 my Contribution to this
apprehension, 13, 21, 30, 44, 46, 52, Exhibition? (1970), 56, 139
54, 58, 75, 83, 103, 112, 135, Self-Burial (1969), 52, 56,
136, 143, 144, 149–51, 153–5, 56n3, 134
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes.

1

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45086-5
254 INDEX
Arnatt, Keith (cont.) Arte de Sistemas II (1972) exhibition,

Seven Exhibitions (1972) exhibition, 82, 93, 95–100
51–3, 56, 62, 71, 94, 121, 122, Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre
138, 139, 216 (1972) exhibition, 10, 44, 82,
A Specification for an Art Condition 93, 95–100
(1970), 139 artifactuality, 21
Tate Work (1972), 53, 122 Art in the Mind (1970) exhibition,
Trouser-Word Piece (1972), 11, 52, 213
113, 121, 122, 125, 126, Artistas del Pueblo, 157, 158
129–34, 172 artistic genius, 4, 16, 29, 43, 112,
Type Token (1970), 71 126, 150, 201, 232
Arrowsmith, Sue artists’ books, 1, 87, 122, 201, 208,
Street Walk (1971), 76 212, 216–18
art Artists’ Books (1976) exhibition, 216
art and politics, 5, 12, 44, 82, 102, Artists Bookworks (1975) exhibition,
171, 227 216, 217
art and science, 193 Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), 209
art-object, 2, 6, 16, 17, 20, 21, 33, Art & Language
36, 38, 43, 44, 50, 56, 70, Air-Conditioning Show (1966–67),
112, 133, 135, 136, 139, 150, 185
155, 157, 171, 190, 192, 197, Air-Conditioning Show/Air Show/
200, 201, 218, 219 Frameworks 1966–7
autonomous art system, 192 (1966–67), 76, 185
autonomy of art, 16, 191, 231 Air Show (1966), 185
category of art, 10, 15, 16, 19, 21, 52, Art & Language Press Room (1970),
102, 103, 112, 135, 138, 145, 188
149, 151, 153, 178, 191, 194, The British Avant-Garde (1971)
197, 200, 210, 219, 228, 230 exhibition, 70, 75, 138, 140
object of art, 2, 5, 10, 13, 15, 18, De legibus naturae (1971), 140
19, 78, 121, 135, 153, 166, Heat Map (1967), 185
181, 186, 198, 230 Hot, Warm, Cool, Cold (1967),
ontology of art, 21, 22, 132, 186, 185, 219
191, 219–20, 226 Idea Structures (1970) exhibition,
sociability, 114 53, 56, 114, 136, 138, 184,
social space, 6, 9, 13, 44, 67, 68, 194, 202
115, 134, 190, 226 Index 01 (1972), 189
system of art, 10, 15, 33, 132, 206 Index 02 (1972), 122, 124, 189
Art as Thought Process (1974) Lecher System (1970), 12, 77n5,
exhibition, 136n4, 216 138, 145, 179, 183–200, 202
Arte de Sistemas I (1971) exhibition, Art-Language (magazine), 140,
10, 44, 82, 87–9, 91, 92, 114 177n1, 187, 204, 206, 209
INDEX 255

art magazines B
Analytical Art, 206 Bainbridge, David, 54, 54n2, 77n5,
Arts Magazine, 185, 201, 203, 205 138, 138n5, 177n1, 184–8,
Aspen, 204 189n2, 195, 206
Interfunktionen, 204, 205, 207 Loop (1966), 185
Museumjournaal, 202 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 24, 34
October, 201 Baldwin, Michael, 4, 54n2, 76, 138,
Red Herring, 207 138n5, 177, 177n1, 184–8,
Studio International (see under 189n2, 215
Studio) Bal, Mieke, 32
The Fox, 207 Barry, Robert, 209, 211, 212
Arts Council of Great Britain, 51, 121, Barthes, Roland
125, 136, 216 connotation, denotation, 28
Artwords and Bookworks (1978) message (linguistic, iconic), 27
exhibition, 216 myth, 26, 27
artworld, 2–4, 13, 20–2, 31, 36, mythification, 156
38, 125, 128, 144, 150, 151, Paris Match (1955), 26, 28
184, 186–90, 193, 196, 200, The death of the author (1967), 205
205, 206, 208, 212, 217, Battcock, Gregory
219, 225 Documentation in conceptual art
Atkinson, Terry, 54n2, 76, 138, (1970), 203
138n5, 177n1, 184, 186–8, Berni, Antonio
189n2, 206, 215 Juanito Langua (1962), 157
Attwood, Martin, 216 Beuys, Joseph, 51, 86, 94–6, 123, 207
Austin, J.L. Office for Direct Democracy by
cheating, 47, 60 Referendum [Büro für Direkte
felicity conditions, 46–8, 60 Demokratie durch
How to Do Things with Words Volksabstimmung] (1972), 189
(1962), 44 Bishop, Claire, 220
illocutionary act, 47, 48, 48n1 Book as Artwork 1960/1972 (1972)
locutionary act, 47 exhibition, 215
misfire, 46, 60 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 220
performative (gesture), 44–51, 60, Braque prize, 87
73, 103 Breakwell, Ian
perlocutionary act, 47 UNSCULPT (1970), 63, 65
speech act theory, 47–51, 57 UNWORD (1969), 63–6, 88
uptake, 47, 49 Brest, Romero, 87, 157
avant-garde (the), 3, 29, 67, 75, 76, The British Avant-Garde (1971)
81, 123, 156, 181, 217 exhibition, 70, 75, 138, 140
Ayer, A.J., 18, 149 Bryson, Norman, 32
256 INDEX
Buchloh, Benjamin, 5, 112, 207 From Figuration to Art Systems

Buren, Daniel, 78, 217 (1971) exhibition, 147
Art & Project Bulletin no. 24 Idea Structures (1970) exhibition,
(1970), 202 53, 56, 114, 136, 138, 184,
It rains, it snows, it paints (1970), 204 194, 202
Studio International July/August Camnitzer, Luis, 84
1970 (1970) exhibition, 202 Cámpora, Hector, 155, 158
Bürger, Peter, 81, 181, 197 Carnap, Rudolf, 18
Burgin, Victor Carnevale, Graciela
All Criteria (1970), 136, 139, Acción del Encierro (1968), 86
140, 147 Caro, Anthony, 54, 69, 70, 178
Any Moment (1970), 136, 140, categorical ambiguity, 218, 219, 226
147, 202 censorship, 62, 67, 80, 87, 93, 97,
Art as Idea from England (1971) 102, 103, 168, 201
exhibition, 114, 136, 146, 147 Centre of Art and Communication
Idea Structures (1970) exhibition, (CAYC)
53, 56, 114, 136, 138, 184, Arte de Sistemas I (1971) exhibition,
194, 202 10, 44, 82, 87–9, 91, 92, 114
Margin note (1972), 135 Arte de Sistemas II (1972)
The New Art (1972) exhibition, exhibition, 82, 93, 95–100
136, 140 Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre
Period of Interruption (1970), (1972) exhibition, 10, 44, 93,
136, 147 95–100
Room (1970), 11, 113, 114, Grupo de los Trece, 86
135–54, 172, 216 Hacia un Perfil del Arte
Rules of thumb (1971), 140 Latinoamericano (1972–74)
Situational aesthetics (1969), 12, exhibition, 87
114, 137, 149, 151 Violencia (1973) exhibition, 169
This Position (1969), 136, 136n4, Ciclo de Arte Experimental (1968), 87
140, 147 Clarín (newspaper), 93, 101
UK 76 (1976), 135 Clark, T.J., 5, 29, 119
Work and Commentary (1973), 140 Club de la Estampa, 157
Burn, Ian, 177, 189, 207 cognition, 17–19, 225
Soft Tape (1966–67), 71 Coldstream Report, 187
Butler, Judith, 49, 67 Collingwood, R.G., 17
Combalía, Victoria, 28, 29
communication (modes of), 35, 46,
C 61, 77, 86, 121, 153
Cage, John, 2, 93, 135, 205 Compton, Michael, 51, 136n4, 216
Camden Arts Centre conceptual art
Environmental Reversal (1969) and conceptualism, 11, 83–5
exhibition, 137 international networks, 138 , 214
INDEX 257

conversational analysis, 118 Duchamp, Marcel

conversation participants, 45, 47 In Advance of a Broken Arm
Coventry College of Art, 54n2, 177n1 (1915), 38
critical discourse analysis, 34, 118 Fountain (1917), 21
Croce, Benedetto, 17 Dwan Gallery, 211
culture Language to be Looked at and/or
cultural commodity, 62, 229 Things to be Read (1967)
cultural memory, 82 exhibition, 209
cultural studies, 33, 112, 118
E
D Eco, Umberto, 28, 86, 118, 183
Danto, Arthur, 4, 20–2 empirical knowledge, 19, 196
de Man, Paul essentialist tradition, 149, 219
irony, 12, 184 Eventstructure Research Group, 137
rhetoric, 12, 183, 184 expression theory (of art), 4, 10,
Derrida, Jacques, 50, 136 17–19
de Saussure, Ferdinand, 23–5 , 135
diachronic-synchronic, 45, 179
dialectics F
dialectical relationship, 12, 24, 28, fallacy
151, 154, 218, 227 intentional fallacy, 49
dialectical understanding, 145, 181 phenomenological fallacy, 229
of experience, 172 family resemblance, 19
Dickie, George, 4, 21, 22 Fanon, Frantz, 80
discourse feminist critique, 5, 33
discourse analysis, 5, 8–10, 16, 33, Ferrari, León, 86, 156
34, 118 figure of speech, 184, 198
discursive field, 5, 115, 140, 149, Flanagan, Barry, 54, 63, 121
169, 173, 185, 197, 220, Hole in the Sea (1969), 76
228, 230 Flynt, Henry, 84
di Tella Institute, 80, 87, 156, 166 formalism, 3, 12, 29, 43, 49, 150,
Documenta 5 (1972) exhibition, 179, 190–3
189, 189n2 Foucault, Michel, 4, 34, 77, 118, 182,
Documenta 6 (1977) exhibition, 216 219, 231
Documentation in conceptual art Fuchs, Rudi, 125
(1970), 203 Fulton, Hamish, 51, 54, 121, 138
documentation; the document, 4, 11,
44, 45, 68, 70, 77–80, 103, 146,
180, 228 G
Drucker, Johanna, 3, 217 García Canclini, Néstor, 81, 166, 167
Ducasse, C.J., 17 gender, 27, 132
258 INDEX
Gilbert & George, 54, 84, 87, 121, language as a social semiotic, 11, 34,
124–5, 138 113, 119
To be with Art is All we Ask (1970), logico-semantics, 35, 113, 120, 127
76, 76n5 metafunctions, 35, 119
Ginzburg, Carlos, 28, 45, 86n7, happenings, 52, 156, 165–6
87, 114 Harrison, Charles, 54, 67, 69, 70,
Tierra (1971), 88–90 75–7, 76–7n5, 85, 86, 114, 136,
Global Conceptualisms (1999) 138, 139, 146, 177n1, 178, 184,
exhibition, 85 186–7, 189n2, 190, 192, 198,
Glusberg, Jorge, 84, 86, 86n7, 91, 93, 199, 202, 209, 215, 217
101, 170 Hauser, Arnold, 5, 29
CAYC, 114 Hayward Gallery
Gödel, Kurt The New Art (1972) exhibition, 51,
incompleteness theorem, 195 121, 122, 124, 125, 128, 133,
Gombrich, Ernst, 198, 199 135, 136, 138, 140, 189, 216
Goodman, Nelson, 30, 32, 79 hegemonic
Graham, Dan art history, 5, 11, 29, 85
Homes for America (1966–67), centre/periphery debate, 11, 85
204, 205 practices, 33
Schema (March 1966) (1966), 204 Heidegger, Martin, 38
grammar of visual design, 35 Hilliard, John
Greenberg, Clement John Hilliard Recent Work (1969)
Greenbergian formalism, 12, 43, exhibition, 137
150, 179, 190–3 765 Paper Balls (1969), 55
history of styles, 191 historiography
Grippo, Victor, 86n7, 99 historiographical discourse, 45, 78,
Grupo Experiencias Estéticas, 90–2 79, 104
Guevara, Ernesto “Che”, 80, 188 historiographical fallacy, 181
historiographical process, 79–80,
84, 85, 180, 181
H Hodge, Robert, 35
Haacke, Hans Huebler, Douglas
cancelled Guggenheim exhibition Duration Piece #4 (1969), 53
(1971), 88, 206 Duration Piece #8 (1970), 152, 153
Condensation Cube (1962–65), 213 Hurrell, Harold, 54, 77n5, 138–9,
MoMA Poll (1970), 188 138n5, 177n1, 184
Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Loop (1966), 185
Estate Holdings, A Real-Time
Social System as of May 1, 1971
(1971), 205–6 I
Halliday, M.A.K. idealist tradition, 17, 31, 36
functional grammar, 11, 34, Idea Structures (1970) exhibition, 53,
113, 119 56, 114, 136, 138, 184, 194, 202
INDEX 259

ideational, 34, 35, 119 Kress, Gunther, 35

ideology Kuhn, Thomas, 191
ideological function, 17, 201 paradigm shift, 193
ideological operation, 82, 230
Information (1970) exhibition, 188
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), L
63–6, 86, 121, 123, 138, 193 Lamelas, David, 28, 114, 137,
institutional theory of art, 10, 19–23 138, 214
intention Publication (1970) exhibition, 214
intentional fallacy, 49 Lanchester Polytechnic, 54n2, 177
intentionality, 49, 52–7, 71, Langer, Susanne, 17
195, 196 Lanusse, Alejandro Agustín, 137,
(inter)textuality, 50, 136, 154–71 155, 169
irony, 12, 177, 179, 183, 184, Latham, John
197–200, 212, 220, 228 Art and Culture (1966–69),
63, 188
Skoob Tower Ceremonies (1964–68),
J 63
Jacoby, Roberto, 86, 156 Still and Chew (1964), 62, 63
Leeuwen, van Theo, 34, 35
Leggett, Mike, 65–7
K Lessing, Gotthold,
Kant, Immanuel Laocoön (1766), 199
Critique of Judgement (1790), 199 Levingston, Roberto Marcelo, 164
judgement of taste, 112 LeWitt, Sol
sensus communis, 16, 30 Art & Project Bulletin no. 43
the sublime, 199 (1971), 202
Kaprow, Allan, 87, 101, 135, 166 Studio International July/August
Karshan, Donald, 75–7, 138 1970 (1970) exhibition, 203
Kawara, On Lexico-grammar, 34
I Got up (1970) series, 203, 209 Lippard, Lucy
Studio International July/August c. 7,500 (1973) exhibition, 210
1970 (1970) exhibition, 203 557,087 (1969) exhibition, 210, 212
Kosuth, Joseph 955,000 (1970) exhibition, 210, 212
Art after philosophy (1969), 11–12, 2,972,453 (1970) exhibition, 210
114, 137, 149 Number 7 (1969) exhibition, 209
Information Room (1970), 189 Studio International July/August
Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) 1970 (1970) exhibition, 202
(1966–68), 211 Lisson Gallery, 51, 56, 71, 124, 214
Kozlov, Christine, 71 Wall Show (1970–71) exhibition,
Krauss, Rosalind, 5, 85, 204 71, 214
260 INDEX
logic military dictatorships (Argentina), 3,

logical analysis, 18, 126 45, 80, 81, 155, 161
logical operations, 143 Miller, J. Hillis, 50
logical positivism, 17 minimalism, 70, 139, 140, 172,
truth of logic, 134, 150 178, 196
logico-semantics, 8, 35, 115 Minujín, Martha, 166
London, 10, 11, 44, 51, 54, 63–6, 69, Mitchell, W.J.T., 31
70, 76, 79, 113, 114, 124, 125, modernism
136, 147, 162, 189, 194, 206, modernist art, 2, 3, 27, 29, 44,
210, 214, 215 49, 76, 112, 113, 140, 155,
Long, Richard, 54, 70, 121 157, 178, 179, 196, 199,
Louw, Roelof 204, 214, 225
The British Avant-Garde (1971) modernist art critic, 178, 179, 196
exhibition, 70, 75 modernist art discourse, 2, 3, 16,
Orange Pyramid Show (1969), 69 29, 44, 76, 140, 155, 178,
Stockwell Depot (1968) exhibition, 69 199, 214, 225
Tape-Recorder projects (1970–71), Montoneros, 169
10, 44, 68–80, 103 Morris, Robert, 140, 196, 199
Luhmann, Niklas, 21 Mukařovský, Jan, 24
Lukács, György, 146 multimodal
multimodal communication, 15, 35,
36, 113, 227
M multimodality, 8, 10, 33–8
Marchán Fiz, Simón, 28, 83 mystification, 4, 147, 182, 184, 211
Margolis, Joseph, 19 myth, 18, 26, 27, 87, 153
Marxism, 4, 34, 118
Marx, Karl, 181, 201, 231n1
base-superstructure dialectics, N
29, 182 narrative
dialectics of history, 184 narrative semiotics of art, 32
Marxist analysis, 4, 112, 156 narrative temporality, 58
material and noumenal world, 16 narratological, 32, 211
McLuhan, Marshall, 193 naturalisation (process of), 27, 33, 81
meaning New Arts Laboratory, London, 65, 69
meaning-making process, 8, 11, New Criticism, 178
36–8, 45, 67, 83, 89, 113–14, New York Cultural Center (NYCC), 75
128, 129, 165 The British Avant-Garde (1971)
mediation of meaning, 10, 44, exhibition, 75, 138, 140
70, 228 Conceptual Art and Conceptual
structuration of meaning, 30, 114, Aspects (1970) exhibition,
126, 130, 230 71, 75
metaphor, 117, 120, 125, 130, 133, The Swiss Avant-Garde (1971)
172, 183, 204, 209 exhibition, 75
INDEX 261

Nigel Greenwood Gallery, 51, 215 Philip Morris (tobacco company), 123
Publication (1970) exhibition, 214 Phillpot, Clive, 208, 216
normalisation (process of), 12, 83, Words and Wordworks (1982)
101, 179, 182, 227, 228 exhibition, 208
photography, 11, 28, 44, 53–7, 70,
71, 93, 134, 205
O Piper, Adrian, 210, 211, 213, 214
October Group (the), 85 Plekhanov, G.V., 23
O’Doherty, Brian Pollock, Griselda, 32, 54
Aspen 5+6 (1967), 204 post-conceptual art, 220
National Endowment for the Arts, power
204, 216 power relations, 93, 112
Orton, Fred, 187, 189, 209 power structures, 27, 34, 93, 111,
Osborne, Peter, 5, 191n3, 220 114, 120, 125–32, 134, 149,
O’Toole, Michael, 35 154, 166, 208, 220, 226
Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 69 pragmatic, 28, 194
Prague linguistic circle, 24
press
P art press, 12, 201–9, 215
Pazos, Luis function of, 10, 38, 91, 125, 139,
Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre 201, 205
(1972) exhibition, 10, 44, 82, printmaking, 93, 154–9, 161–2, 166
93, 95, 96 procedural aspect, 113, 130, 143,
Experiencias realizadas:1969–71 146, 172
(1969–71), 90 proposition
La realidad subterránea (1972), 94–7 general form of, 115, 116
Proceso a nuestra realidad (1972), of logic, 116
169, 170 propositional content, 11, 34, 48,
Proyecto de monumento al prisionero 56, 141
político desaparecido (1972), public space, 5, 45, 82, 89–90, 98, 99,
94, 97 147, 165, 210
Pécora, Oscar, 157
Peirce, Charles S., 24, 25, 32, 49
icon-symbol-index, 25 R
performative, 8, 11, 43–104, 183 Ramsden, Mel, 4, 71, 177, 189n2, 207
performative speech act, 46 Soft Tape (1966–67), 71
performativity, 56, 71, 77, 79, reading
220c, 232 modes of, 45, 113, 154
Perón, Juan, 155, 158, 169 reading and viewing regimes, 9, 37,
phenomenology 111, 114, 134, 226
phenomenological, 53, 191, 197, ready-made (work of art), 5, 195,
199, 204 197, 230
phenomenological approach, 191 Reise, Barbara, 131, 132, 206, 215
262 INDEX
relational aesthetics, 220 semantic relevance, 37

rhetoric semantic structure, 48
rhetorical operations, 8, 12, 179, 183 semiosis, 28, 136, 172
rhetorical shifts, 12, 45, 179, 191, field of, 28, 172
196, 219 semiotics
rhetorical tropes, 98 semiological perspective, 26
Roberts, John, 81, 198 semiotic system, 6, 30, 34, 86, 119
Romero, Juan Carlos sensationalism, 81
Arte e Ideología/CAYC al aire libre Seven Exhibitions (1972) exhibition,
(1972) exhibition, 10, 44, 82, 51, 52, 71, 121, 122, 138
93–5 Seymour, Anne, 51, 122, 140
Arte Gráfica Grupo Buenos Aires, Siegelaub, Seth
158 International General (press), 211
El juego lúgubre (1972), 99–100 January 5–31 1969 (1969)
En homenaje a los caídos el 25/5/73 exhibition, 211, 214
en la lucha por la liberación March 1969 (1969) exhibition, 212
1973/Homenaje a Bellocq Siegelaub Seth: Beyond Conceptual
(1973), 158 Art (2015–16) exhibition, 213
3er Premio Swift de Grabado (1970) Studio International July/August
exhibition, 160 1970 (1970) exhibition, 202–3
4.000.000 m2 of the City of Buenos The Artist’s Reserved Rights
Aires (1970), 147 Transfer and Sale Agreement,
Proceso a nuestra realidad (1972), 212, 213
169 Xerox Book (1968), 212
Salón Premio Artistas con sign
Acrilicopaolini (1972–73) indeterminacy, 50
exhibitions, 168, 169 signification, 2, 9, 17, 24, 27, 28,
Swift en Swift (1970), 11, 113, 35, 38, 86, 89, 94, 103, 132,
154–71 135, 140, 153, 156, 165, 171,
Russian avant-garde, 3 209, 228
signifier/signified, 23–6, 28, 50, 102
Situationists, 151, 165
S social
St Martin’s College London, 54 social history of art, 5, 29, 112
Salón Premio Artistas con social conditions, 23, 49, 98,
Acrilicopaolini, 156, 168, 169 112, 166
Searle, John, 48, 50, 56 social function of art, 8, 29, 83,
self-referentiality, 43, 85, 190 102, 157, 198, 227
self-reflectivity, 43 social function of language, 23, 24
semantics social phenomena, 24
semantic elements, 113, 116, 147, social semiotic, 8, 11, 34, 111, 113,
155, 161, 162, 165, 172, 195 119, 120
INDEX 263

Sontag, Susan, 28 The New Art (1972) exhibition,

spectatorship, 61 51, 121, 122, 124, 125,
spectatorial desires, 45, 228 128, 133, 135, 136, 138,
Stockwell Depot London, 69 140, 189, 216
structuralism, 24, 34, 122, 124 Tremlett, David, 51, 54n2, 121
Stubbs, Michael, 119 Tap Piece (1970), 76
Studio International, 12, 54, 69, 76, Tucumán Arde (1968), 87
114, 125, 136, 137, 149, 184, Tupamaros, 84
196, 201, 202, 204, 207, 212
Harrison, Charles, 54, 114,
177n1, 187 U
July/August 1970 (1970) exhibition, unambiguity, 30
69, 136, 184, 202 universal
Townsend, Peter, 202 universal (the) and the particular
stylistics, 12, 49, 113, 154, 155, 162–4 (dialectics), 146, 199
Swift, Jonathan, 154, 161, 164 universal communicability, 16, 49
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), 154, universal concept, 18, 36
161, 162 universal expression, 16
synchronic and diachronic, 45, 179 universality, 30, 49, 117, 134
Szeemann, Harald universal status of art, 16
Documenta 5 (1972) exhibition, 189 universal truth, 4, 16, 18, 24, 37,
When Attitudes Become Form (1969) 50, 112, 231
exhibition, 69, 121, 123, universal value, 16
138, 189
V
T Ver y Estimar prize, 87
taste Victoria and Albert Museum, 208,
judgement of, 112, 184, 191 215, 216
modernist, 192 viewing
Tate Gallery, 51–3, 69, 136 regimes, 9, 37, 68, 111, 114,
tautology, 11, 19, 84, 85, 93, 112, 117, 134, 226
137, 150, 153, 160, 164, 227 viewing and reading assumptions, 9
teleological, 153 violence
temporal banalisation, 91, 94
temporal and conceptual tension, naturalisation, 81, 83, 94
59, 60, 103 trivialisation, 81
temporal distortion, 58 visual
temporality, 58, 70, 91 visual and textual registers, 60
textuality, 50, 78, 136, 154–71 visual representation (systems of),
text-based, 4, 53, 67, 76, 136, 138, 15, 27, 29, 33, 37, 130
140, 146, 155, 179, 210, 216 Vološinov, V.N., 23, 25, 34, 118
264 INDEX
W Philosophical Investigations (1953),

Wall Show (1970–71) exhibition, 56, 117
71, 214 picture [Bild], 116, 144
Weiner, Lawrence proposition (general
Declaration of Intent (1968), 145, form of), 11, 113,
152, 188, 203 115–17, 119, 120,
Statements (1968), 152, 188, 213 126, 144, 150
Studio International July/August 1970 Wollen, Peter, 28, 151
(1970) exhibition, 203 Wollheim, Richard, 22
Weitz, Morris, 19, 22, 122
Western metaphysics, 16
When Attitudes Become Form (1969) Z
exhibition, 69, 121, 123, 138, 189 Zabala, Horacio
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 70, 72 300 metros de cinta negra para
Wittgenstein, Ludwig enlutar una plaza pública
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1972), 98
(1921), 115–17 Ziff, Paul, 18

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Image and Text in Conceptual Ar t

Critical Operations in Context

Image and Text

ISBN 978-3-319-45085-8 ISBN 978-3-319-45086-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960206

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover design by Sam Johnson

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

2 Parallels Between Art and Language 15

3 The Performative Gesture of Image

3.3 Staging the Act: Keith Arnatt’s Art as an Act

4 The Logico‐Semantics of Image and Text111

5 Rhetorical Operations and the Discursive

Fig. 1.1 Victor Burgin, Possession (1976). Duotone Lithograph.

Fig. 3.7 Carlos Ginzburg, Tierra (1971) at the exhibition Arte de

subterránea (1972) at the exhibition Arte e Ideología/

Conceptual art, as a historical art movement that emerged in the late

© The Author(s) 2016 1

1.1 Why Language?

In short, it foregrounds how and what art communicates. In previous

In this historical context, many conceptual art practices incorporated

social life (Barthes, Althusser, Foucault). It particularly showed how, in

Image and text juxtapositions, therefore, do not only ­provide a route

1.2 About This Book

contexts. It considers the use of photography and installation in staging

after philosophy and Burgin’s Situational aesthetics, both published in the

objects emerged by the end of the 1970s. This effectively institutionalised

In recent years, there has been a tendency to celebrate the fluidity of

Parallels Between Art and Language

For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ

2.1 Opening Remarks

© The Author(s) 2016 15

historically relevant to the production of conceptual art, and many return in

2.2 From Expression Theory to the Institutional

­ elonging to the human community. This in turn functioned as a moral

2.2.1 Logical Problems with Expression Theory

Joseph Margolis (1976) summarises the paradox of such philosophical

2.2.2 Towards an Institutional Theory of Art

corrigible and governed by decisions for its extension to cover particular

However, it is also possible that something is considered an artwork prior

“obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to

2.3 Art as a Social Phenomenon. Semiotics

While the above discussions were to occupy much of the Anglo-Saxon

The objective study of the phenomena of “art” is directed to the work of

The development of semiotics offered a new method of relating the con-

2.3.1 A Semiotics of Visual Culture

Roland Barthes initiated a systematic analysis of images and texts in

Regarding the relation between image and text, Barthes emphasises

through which a message is taken as given or as natural—as in the case of

2.3.2 A Social History of Art

2.4 Art Systems and the Art Historical

2.5 New Perspectives from Socio-Linguistics:

linguistics developed at the University of East Anglia based on M.A.K.

additional but related information—e.g. an image of someone arriving at

2.6 Closing Remarks

elements with narrative structures as these are particularly found in comics,

Dickie, George. 1969. Defining art. American Philosophical Quarterly 6(3):

McDonald, Margaret. 1970 [1949]. Some distinctive features of arguments used

The Performative Gesture of Image

How visual does visual art have to be?

3.1 Opening Remarks

© The Author(s) 2016 43

­ nderstanding of art as the l­anguage of expression: intuitive, unfiltered by

2 Parallels Between Art and Language 15

3 The Performative Gesture of Image

3.3 Staging the Act: Keith Arnatt’s Art as an Act

4 The Logico‐Semantics of Image and Text111

5 Rhetorical Operations and the Discursive

Image and text juxtapositions, therefore, do not only provide a route

elonging to the human community. This in turn functioned as a moral

nderstanding of art as the language of expression: intuitive, unfiltered by

the space of art as a social space by exploring the work’s logico-semantic